


Heaven's So Big There Ain't No Need to Look Up

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Harsh Realm
Genre: A garden, Angst, Banter, Comedy, Friends to Lovers, Gratuitous Poetry, Horseback Riding, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon, Romance, Slow Burn, and keep goats, maybe some chickens, no I don't want to live in an idyllic cabin in the woods, why would you ever think such a thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 10:21:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20469440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: Two and a half years after the war ended and the game was won, and two years after Mike Pinocchio disappeared without a word, Tom Hobbes comes looking for him. The reunion doesn't start the way he expected. Then nothing else goes the way he expected, either.





	Heaven's So Big There Ain't No Need to Look Up

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written in this fandom for like ten years. Then something in my head broke and I wrote this, basically exactly as it appears here with some very minor line editing, in roughly twenty-four hours. 
> 
> Well, call it eighteen or so. I did eat and go to sleep and shower and stuff.
> 
> Anyway, I think that's just what happens when a story has been incubating for literally years. 
> 
> I should note that if you're reading this and you're not me, I'm frankly somewhat surprised. This fandom was never big and it's been essentially dead for a while. But if you _are_ reading this, and you're _not_ me, I'm really happy about that, because I genuinely think this one of my favorite things of any kind that I've ever written. It's certainly coming from kind of a deep place, goofy canon be damned. I did write it with the expectation that no one would read it but me, and maybe that's why it happened so fast; I was writing for no one but me, and that's weirdly freeing. But when we write something we're really proud of, we always like it when other people take a look at it. 
> 
> If you do read it, thanks. 
> 
> (By the way, I know I've taken liberties/probably fucked up some stuff here about firearms, what vegetables and fruits are in season at what time, how other things work re: roughing it at a subsistence level. Don't care. This is about a world inside a computer game. Anything is possible.)
> 
> (and poetry credits at the end)

When the first bullet whizzes past his head, ripping through the leaves about a foot to the left of his ear, Tom doesn't immediately understand what's happening.

The second bullet shatters a tree branch inches above him and at last he drops, the instincts that kept him alive for years in an endless war zone finally kicking back in, and as the impact of the ground punches the breath out of his lungs and a twig jabs sharply into his belly, he thinks about how absolutely, massively, _incandescently_ furious Mike Pinocchio would have been with him for needing a second bullet to prompt him to go down.

He would have hidden the fury. He would have jabbed his elbow into Tom’s middle harder than the twig once they were both lying flat, curse him for a fucking dumbass, tell him that if he wants to kill himself that's fine but he should do it on his own damn time when he isn't likely to get his brain splattered all over Mike’s shirt, then subside into an aura of exasperated contempt for the rest of the day, speaking to Tom only in snaps and growls like an annoyed pit bull.

He’d have done those things, because for all his ubiquitous crankiness, Mike rarely liked to show the full extent of either his fear or his fury. Crankiness served as a cover for both. Tom was never entirely sure why, but after years of observing him at close range, he supposed that perhaps it had to do with the sheer intensity of those feelings. The rawness. Perhaps showing them would have been too much vulnerability for him to bear, even with a man who had fought beside him and slept pressed up against him on freezing nights and watched his back for so long.

God knows he rarely showed anything else. _Cranky_ was Mike’s default setting and he tended to be reliable with it.

For the past two years, he hasn't thought much about Mike. Three months ago he realized that there was some kind of purpose in that, intent, and intent of the self-defensive variety. This was a profoundly uncomfortable realization, and he got a lot of sleepless nights out of it and not much in the way of useful insight, and in all those restless hours wandering the halls of the palace that used to belong to General Omar Santiago before General Omar Santiago was placed into a small cell five floors underground and allowed to see the sun for about four hours a week. 

Mike wanted no hours. Mike wanted no hours because Mike wanted him _dead_, and then when it became clear that Mike wasn't going to be able to bully Tom into that outcome he pushed for no sunlight again ever, and Tom stuck his ground, and the argument lasted a full and very bitter two days during which Santiago smirked at them entirely too much, and in the end they grudgingly settled on four hours a week and that was that.

And then Mike was gone, and after that Tom could honestly have done whatever he wanted. Yet he maintained the deal. He never really considered why.

He didn't think about Mike, either. Then he realized he wasn't thinking about Mike, and in the days and weeks and months that followed he found it increasingly difficult to do anything else.

So it's not exactly strange that he's thinking about him now, practically strolling through a garden of memory while two more shots cut through the tree cover and splinter a shower of bark off the thick trunk of the maple beside him.

The truth is that he's begun to wonder about himself a little.

What he's doing now ultimately offered itself as the only real solution.

He should do something about this. Otherwise he's just going to stay pinned down, and whoever is trying to kill him is going to advance on him sooner or later and finish the job. He didn't know what to expect when he came out here, but getting shot at was fairly far down the list of possibilities. The more sparsely populated parts of the eastern half of the country can sometimes be rough neighborhoods, but in fact the people out here are usually more decent than a lot of the rebuilding urban centers. His face is known, what he's done is known, what he _means_ is known, but there are times when even that isn't reliable assassination-proofing. He still does dislike bodyguards.

Mike had always done for that. He would have snorted at being called such, but the fact remains.

Anyway. Getting shot at. Right.

First thing is not to be in the place this would-be assassin is shooting at. He turns and crawls slowly to the left, hugging the ground, ignoring the twigs and rocks and jagged bits of root. Once this was nothing. Once this wouldn't have made him bat a single eye. Once this kind of thing was a day that ended in Y. But it's been a while. He'd own that he's not used to it.

As it turns out, getting shot at isn't unlike riding a bicycle, in that getting on a bike after a couple of years still involves some time for reacquaintance.

And it was such a nice afternoon, too, he thinks as he continues to crawl. Another shot—where he was, by the sound of it, which means the shooter hasn't yet caught on to the fact that he's moved. Nice afternoon; he drove the SUV to where the gravel road became meadow and set out across the meadow under kind April sunshine, butterflies flitting around him all white and yellow, bees humming sleepily over the wildflowers, birdcalls echoing from the line of forest to his right, cool breeze smelling of damp earth sweeping through the grass and combing through his hair. He'd been in such a good mood. First genuinely good mood in a stretch of time he can't quantify. He had to leave the car behind, sure, but the weather was fine and he didn't have far to go on foot and indeed it seemed wrong to stay in a car when walking was available. His pack was light. He had almost been whistling, which he's not good at, but when it comes to singing he's worse.

Then, following the directions he'd been given at the general store fifteen or so miles back up the road, he had turned and cut in among the trees, and he'd gotten a pleasant ten minutes of that, the bright cessation of the forest in sight, before the shooting started.

And now it's occurring to him to actually be worried about this.

Someone is shooting at him. Shooting to kill, as far as he can tell. He's less than half a mile from his destination—maybe even less than that. Someone inclined to shoot to kill, that close to where he's going, and now it hits him that he might not be the only one in trouble.

He hasn't drawn his Glock. Not yet. But he's thanking a God he stopped believing in a while ago that he brought it with him, and when the time comes he's not going to hesitate.

His stomach sinks into the dirt and he briefly closes his eyes. Shit, it's been a long fucking time since he had to kill anyone.

Personally, anyway.

Another shot. Nearer. Less than ten yards. The alarmed screeching of birds in panicked flight. Tom grits his teeth and digs his fingers into the leaf litter. They've caught on after all and they're tracking him. He has no idea how, but they have, and they are. Terrific. Just terrific. This is precisely how he would have elected to kick off a reunion.

He moves again. He's trying to be quieter. Is it the noise that's giving him away? Possibly. If so, the shooter must have inhumanly good hearing. Regardless, he can't afford to pause again; he circles slowly around where he estimates the shooting is coming from, and when he gets some real distance between himself and where Whoever It Is is aiming at, he lifts himself a little higher off the ground and picks up the pace.

Circle around. He’s done this a hundred times. More. On their knees behind cover, Mike’s silent direction: _Flank ‘em_. In a twisted way this almost feels good, the pure simplicity of it. Everything has been so goddamn complicated since they won the war, and he never imagined that level of complicated could be that level of _boring_.

But this feels like slipping into a comfortable pair of old and well-worn jeans. He barely has to think.

_Flank ‘em._

He does. Then he's on one knee behind the root base of a fallen tree with his gun in his hand, peering around it through the treeline and into the grass beyond—and there, an instant of it but unmistakable: flash of the sun off a scope. Close. Less than twenty yards away, behind a low mound of neatly rectangular stones left there from some long-abandoned construction project.

And the shooter lifts his head, peering at the trees, and Tom sees who it is and shoves himself to his feet with his heart jammed into his throat.

“Pinocchio!” He stumbles out from behind the roots and through the trees, into the sun, his Glock still in his hand but both arms up and waving. “_Mike!_ Hold your fire, it's me!”

Mike Pinocchio raises his head again—higher. He hasn't lowered the rifle. Tom can see him better now, can see the scowl, and his heart falls out of his throat and somersaults against his ribs. That scowl. Jesus Christ, he has no words for what it feels like to see that scowl again.

“It's Hobbes!”

Mike chambers another round. “I know!”

So after two years, that's how they say hello.

~

Mike hasn't lost the scowl. Tom couldn't care less.

The guns got lowered. They both got moving. They approached each other through the grass and now they're face to face, no more than a foot away, and the urge to reach out and touch Mike merely to establish his reality is nearly overwhelming.

He won't do it. He intuits that Mike won't appreciate it. A hug would be an even worse idea. Have they ever really hugged? In all the years they were together? He honestly can't recall. Not much of a _hugger,_ is Mike Pinocchio.

Mike simply looks at him in silence. Beneath the scowl, which he wears like a mask, his face is difficult to read. He has more in the way of facial hair than he did—not quite a beard, more thick stubble—and his skin appears slightly more weathered, and he's somehow simultaneously leaner and better fed than he ever was outside the fence when the fence was still a thing, but other than that he's the same.

No. Not quite. There are silver flecks in that stubble. At his temples. Subtle but there.

Tom pulls in a breath. Remembers that he has a gun in his hand and holsters it. Gives Mike a smile that feels more than a little ridiculous. “Hi.”

Mike huffs. Nothing more.

“I would've…” Now he's feeling uncertain. Should he have anticipated feeling anything else? It's been years. Perhaps Mike _looks_ mostly the same but that doesn't mean there haven't been changes in him, possibly dramatic ones. And there’s the fact that scant minutes ago Mike was shooting at him, although he now doubts that was about more than chasing him off.

He tries again. “I would’ve told you I was coming, but no one seemed like they were too eager to get in touch with you.”

Mike’s mouth tightens minutely. “They know better.” _Better than you. _

“Yeah,” Tom says, pushing past that primarily because he doesn't know how to respond to it. “Well. Anyway, I figured I'd just… stop by.”

Mike looks at him for another moment or two. Coughs a rough laugh, shakes his head a single time. “‘Stop by’,” he echoes, and his voice is a faint and decently competent mockery of Tom’s determined cheerfulness. “You just happened to be in the fuckin’ neighborhood.”

Tom shrugs. Yes, that was a pretty stupid way of putting it.

“Just happened,” Mike repeats slowly, the words soaked in sarcasm, “to be in the neighborhood. The neighborhood six hundred and thirty goddamn miles from where you came from.” He cocks his head, shifts the rifle in his hands. He doesn't appear to be about to aim it at Tom again, but nevertheless, Tom feels a twinge of nervousness. “Got a lotta friends out this way, do you? Got a lotta errands to run? You go to the fuckin’ mall?”

Tom shrugs again, increasingly at a loss. His smile has withered on his face. There is in fact a mall about fifty miles back, but it looks as if it's been on fire multiple times, likely because it has.

“I wanted to see you,” he says quietly, and Mike rolls his eyes in baroque exasperation, half turns, and then, as if he's not sure what to do with himself, he turns back.

“I get any say in that?” Before Tom can think of an answer, Mike jerks his chin at the woods. “Where'd you leave your car?”

“Uh.” Tom glances over his shoulder. “A mile back? Where the road stops?”

“The road stops there for a _reason_.” Mike’s jaw is clenched. This isn't a show. As usual, he's doing what he can to blunt its edges, but he is sincerely angry. “I am a mile and a half from where the road stops _for a fucking reason_. That occur to you, Hobbes? At all? Did it ever penetrate your thick fuckin’ skull that maybe I'm all the way out here ‘cause I'm not wild about _guests?_”

This is going nowhere. Or it is, but it's going somewhere bad. He doesn't think he actually believed that Mike would be overjoyed to see him, especially unannounced, and in fact even modestly pleased would have been surprising, but getting shot at is a whole other level, and being spoken to like this, from this well of clearly heartfelt anger, is too.

_So maybe just go. It's what he obviously wants_.

The sun is starting to go down. April is kind, but the days haven’t yet lengthened into summer. It might be dusk before he makes it back to the SUV.

“So you're out here, what, playing Unabomber?” He sighs. Suddenly he feels weary. He was hoping he had left the weariness behind six hundred and thirty miles away. “You know what? Fine. Fuck you. You don't want me here, I'm gone.” He whirls, begins to stalk back toward the woods, then halts.

It was such a nice afternoon.

He looks over his shoulder. His chest is tight, and he doesn't like it. He didn't want to feel this way. Maybe there was no other way he could have ever felt.

“Two years, and this is what I get. Two damn years, Mike.” He exhales, hard. Disgusted. “Like I said. Fuck you.”

Disgusted, yes. But more than that, so much more than that as he resumes his stalk to the treeline, it hurts. It fucking _hurts_. It hurts more than he would have believed it could. This man, this man he saw every day, day after day after day, and then he left, and then nothing for two years, and now this is what greets him, this shooting sneering nightmare version of Mike Pinocchio at his worst.

No. No, at his worst he's utterly cold. At his worst he barely seems human. And at his worst, no matter how badly he wanted to disbelieve it, Tom could never entirely shake the sense that part of Mike reveled in hurting people.

When you hurt someone else, you're not the one hurting.

_Some people,_ he recalls thinking, _are not sadists by choice_.

He's reached the trees when he hears the heavy, resigned sigh. “Wait.”

He knew. Under the hurting, somehow he knew it would go like this. He turns, teeth catching his lower lip.

Mike looks up at the sky as if beseeching something for strength. Drops his head and pinches the bridge of his long nose. “Jesus fucking Christ, it'll be dark by the time you get to the road, just…” Another sigh and he spins on his heel, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. “Come the fuck on. Dick.”

He spits the last word. But from Mike, from the very first, that was practically a pet name, and the tightness in Tom’s chest loosens a bit as he hurries after.

~

There's no road, but there is a path—something that might have been a deer path to begin with until it was widened by human passage. Through the grass, through a couple copses of young trees, swinging in a wide arc but running roughly parallel to the forest, all dust and quartzy pebbles. Mike strides along in silence, radiating irritation. Tom strides along next to him, taking the irritation as placidly as he can.

Like old goddamn times.

Breaking the silence might not be advisable, but it's the kind of thing he used to do. He shoots a glance at Mike, his lips curling. “You were worried about me walking home in the dark? That's sweet.”

Mike grunts. “There's bears.”

“I didn't know you had family out here.”

The look Mike gives him is thinly amused. Beyond that, Tom isn’t sure what he's seeing there. Isn't sure how to classify it. “Y’know,” Mike mutters, “I never called you a fuckin’ twink.”

Tom blinks at him. _Twink_. He dimly remembers that word being tossed his way once or twice in a couple of the watering pits they ended up in, remembers that he shrugged it off like he shrugged off everything and never bothered asking what it meant.

He opens his mouth to ask now. Then thinks better of it. It's doubtful that he'd get a genuine answer; more likely he'd get another couple shovelfuls of shit.

So after that, silence strikes him as preferable.

It isn't much longer anyway. In the ruddy rays of sunset, from the center of another small collection of trees, it emerges, and Tom stares at it, startled into a new kind of silence.

He said _Unabomber_. Connotations of a dilapidated shack in the woods, bare subsistence, aggressively uncivilized. What he's looking at is a neat little cabin at the end of the path, single-story, wide porch, roof softly greenish with moss. To the side is an equally neat garden—herbs and vegetables, some things he can identify and some things he can't—and at the other side, an area closed off by wire fencing in which a few chickens peck and cluck to themselves around a coop. From behind the cabin he hears the meditative bleating of a goat.

More than one. More than one goat.

This is perplexing. Mike profoundly dislikes goats. Tom was never able to determine why.

He stares at Mike as they approach the porch, struggling to process. Struggling to keep from breaking into incredulous laughter. “You're a _farmer_.”

Mike glares at him. “I gotta eat.”

“Yeah, and you go into town like four times a year max, they told me all about it. You freak them out.”

Unpleasant smile. “Well, I try.”

“I guess you do. Seriously,” Tom breathes, shaking his head. “Farmer.”

Mike climbs the porch steps, half turns. There's a rocking chair. Of course there's a rocking chair. “You call me that again and you can sleep with the fuckin’ goats.”

Tom smirks. He's done with being even remotely diplomatic. Not least because he's getting the sense that however angry Mike was initially, he's now prepared to allow Tom to get away with approximately the amount he always used to, so he's comfortably aware of the boundaries.

“Whatever, Almanzo.”

Mike arches a brow as he opens the door. “What?”

“Almanzo. Almanzo Wilder?” Tom follows him inside, looking around. “_Farmer Boy?_”

Nonplussed silence.

“You ever read _Little House on the Prairie?_”

Mike blinks at him. Abruptly breaks into a laugh that actually… isn't solely contempt. There might not be any contempt in it at all. “So you're even more _you_ than you were. Dunno why I'm surprised.”

Tom is about to ask him what precisely that's supposed to mean, when he focuses on the cabin’s interior and lapses into silence.

It's largely a perfect match to the cabin’s exterior: neat, simple, neither luxurious or spartan—and in fact that last is what he might have expected. Instead he's looking at something clearly occupied—_lived in_—for some time by someone who doesn't have much but values and cares for what they have. Wooden table large enough to seat two—maybe three at a squeeze—set against the wall to the right, beside two windows framed with plain dark blue curtains clearly made by hand from cloth that used to be something else. Stretching toward the back of the cabin, a modest kitchen, or what Mike has made into a kitchen—counters, cupboards, a sink and taps indicating that the place is equipped with running water. A couple of bookshelves to the left, full to overflowing, with books stacked horizontally on top of the vertical rows and three more piles pushed out of the way on the floor. A maroon couch that manages to be ancient without being ratty, a plaid blanket draped casually over the back. Equally ancient armchair near a wood stove in the corner. On the stovetop sit a pot and a kettle. No lamps that he can see, at least none that run on electricity, but a kerosene lantern sits on the table, and another one hangs by the door.

It's comfortable. It's actually _comfortable_.

Mike Pinocchio has made a home for himself and it's comfortable.

Tom turns in a slow circle, conscious after a few seconds that his mouth is slightly open, and then additionally conscious that Mike is merely standing there and watching him look, his arms folded across his chest and his lips quirked into that patented crooked sardonic Pinocchio Smile.

“Like it?”

“It’s, uh.” Tom swallows. “It's nice.”

Mike snorts, pushes past him toward the kitchenette. Tom glances back; the rifle is now on a rack by the door, just above a shotgun and another rifle. Naturally Mike wouldn't content himself with a single firearm.

No sign of his MP5, though.

“Yeah,” Mike says, voice raised as he does something in one of the cupboards. “Nice. There's one bedroom and it's mine, GI, so you can bunk on the couch.”

_GI_. There's another twinge. When did he last hear that? He isn't certain but he'd swear that by the time he said goodbye, that specific pet name had largely vanished from the collection Mike had for him. Yet here it is now, like he never stopped saying it.

_By the time he said goodbye_. There's a bad joke.

There was no goodbye. One day he was just gone.

He shrugs, although Mike can't hear him, and wanders over to the bookshelves, scanning the titles in the last of the daylight streaming in through the windows. What would Mike read? Once he would have said, only half joking, that he couldn't swear that Mike read at all. Yet these shelves are crammed full, and they're crammed full of a bewildering range of genres. Flaking paperbacks. Battered hardbacks. Fiction—what he supposes one would sniffily call _literary_, but also a healthy amount of science fiction and fantasy. Kerouac, Faulkner, Hemingway, Conrad, Dickens, but also Tolkien, Asimov, H.G. Wells, Ursula K. Le Guin, a large selection of Ray Bradbury. Octavia Butler. Joanna Russ, a name which rings a bell but only a faint one. Tom is running his fingers over the spines, and stops briefly when he reaches a well-thumbed copy of _The Handmaid’s Tale. _

Mike reads feminist science fiction. Apparently.

Okay.

More. No Laura Ingalls Wilder that he can see, but more names that ping him each time with a new ripple of surprise. C.S. Lewis. G.K. Chesterton. Kierkegaard. Kant. Foucault. Sartre. Simone de Beauvoir. _Poetry_, an entire two shelves of poetry collections, some names he knows and many he doesn't. The Qur’an, The Bhagavad Gita, and two translations of The Bible. Shakespeare. _The Odyssey. Paradise Lost_. The full _Divine Comedy_. Then one he pulls off the shelf because he has to check, he has to know, and his suspicion is correct—not only a large bound copy of _The Canterbury Tales,_ but a copy of _The Canterbury Tales_ in the original Middle English.

High school? Had to be high school when he last encountered it. His lips silently form the words, and far in the back corridors of his mind he hears his twelfth grade English teacher’s lilting voice reading the uncannily lovely language aloud.

_Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, _   
_The droghte of March hath perced to the roote_

“Hey.” Smack on his shoulder and he jumps, nearly drops the book, and Mike plucks it out of his hands and slides it back on the shelf with an exasperated sigh. “Don't touch that, it's expensive.”

Tom gapes at him. He feels wrongfooted. He feels like he never really had any right feet to begin with. “Nothing is expensive anymore.”

“How about there's no fuckin’ way I ever find another copy of that edition?”

“So…” Mike reads poetry. Mike reads philosophy. Mike, again, reads feminist science fiction. “Can you read it?”

Mike gazes at him in silence for a moment. Then, without lifting the book back off the shelf to refer to it, the words slide effortlessly out of his mouth.

_Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,_   
_The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, _   
_And bathed every veyne in swich licóur _   
_Of which vertú engendred is the flour; _   
_Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth _   
_Inspired hath in every holt and heeth _   
_The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne _   
_Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, _   
_And smale foweles maken melodye, _   
_That slepen al the nyght with open ye, _   
_So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages, _   
_Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages—_

He stops. Again with that crooked, sardonic smile. Tom feels a bit like he might have to lean on the bookshelf for support. Did he ever know this man? Did he _ever_ really know this man?

What _else_ doesn't he know?

“I can keep going,” Mike says mildly, “if you want. Don't got the whole prologue down yet but I'm working on it.”

“You… memorized the prologue.” Tom takes a breath. “Of _The Canterbury Tales_.”

“No, I said I'm working on it.” He slaps Tom’s shoulder again, brisk, neither friendly nor unfriendly. “C’mon, dick, unless you don't want any chow.”

~

Chow is spaghetti. Spaghetti made on the woodstove, and while the sauce comes out of a can, when Tom takes a bite there's a burst of herbal freshness that no can could deliver. Maybe the can was the starting point, but during the heating process Mike must have added some ingredients of his own.

Tom wasn't watching that part. Despite Mike herding him away from it, he was examining the bookshelf again.

Now he and Mike are sitting at the little table, the lantern burning low between them, and he's aware only now of how utterly ravenous he is, and he forks the spaghetti into himself so fast that Mike kicks him under the table.

He raises his head. A blob of sauce falls from his chin. Mike is regarding him with open distaste.

“You wanna just get rid of the fork, get your whole face in there?”

Tom swallows the bite. Suddenly his ears are burning. “Sorry.” He fumbles for the cloth napkin Mike flung at him when he sat down, wipes his chin and mouth. “I just… I didn't really have lunch.” He pauses. “And I've been living on cold MREs for a couple of days, there's also that.”

“Took you two days to get here?”

“The roads are shit. I had to double back a bunch. You know that.”

“I do know that,” Mike says, reaching for his glass of water. Very cool, very clean, almost sweet; Tom supposes it might be from a spring. Or perhaps it's just the groundwater itself. “I mean I'm kinda surprised it didn't take you longer.”

“I never stopped that long. There wasn't…” Tom twirls pasta around the fork, gazing down at it. “I dunno, there wasn't much to stop for. It felt better to keep moving.”

_Like we always did. _

Mike’s lips curl. “You were just that desperate to see me again. I'm so touched.”

Tom rolls his eyes. Two can play at the eye-rolling game. “Shut up.”

“No, it's my fuckin’ house.” Pause. Long pause. An owl hoots outside, low and thoughtful. Mike toys with his glass, not looking at Tom, not really looking at anything as far as Tom can discern, and the lantern light casts strange shadows across his face. The almost-beard is another shadow, a new one, and it's all vaguely disorienting.

“Why did you come?” he asks finally. Quietly. The light catches his eyes and fills them. How many nights by how many fires have his eyes caught and held that kind of light. “Really.”

Tom doesn't answer. It's not for lack of wanting to. It's for lack of knowing how. Surely he should have anticipated that he'd be asked this question. Surely he should have anticipated that he'd have to provide _some_ kind of explanation for his presence. Two days of driving. It should have taken longer. And no, he had no other earthly or otherworldly reason to travel this way. He came here for one thing and one thing only. Singular. Simple.

So he really should be able to pack it into a few words and spit them out.

“I wanted to see you,” he says at last, after what feels like an hour, and it's true and it's not as if he hasn't _said_ it before, but it sounds so weak in his ears, so inadequate, and that flush is spreading to the back of his neck. Please God, the light isn't strong enough for Mike to see. “It's been two years.”

“Yeah,” Mike says, still quiet. “It has.”

“And then you shot at me.”

Mike’s mouth twists. What humor is there is thin and anemic. “I wanted you to go the fuck away, you stupid asshole.”

“What if you'd hit me?”

Mike snorts. “I wasn't gonna hit you.”

“What if you did?” Tom persists, because this is a much easier line of conversation than the question of why he's sitting here eating Mike’s spaghetti. “I don't mean killed me, I just mean hit me.”

Mike finally looks at him. That light has faded from his eyes, and for some reason Tom can't articulate, to himself or anyone else, he feels a faint sweep of relief. “Left you for the fuckin’ bears, I guess.”

“Whatever,” Tom mutters, and returns to the spaghetti.

~

The fire in the woodstove has burned down to a warm glow. Mike comes into the main room with a pillow and throws it in Tom’s direction; Tom, who is testing out the couch, manages to snap to attention just in time to catch it.

The couch is exactly as it looks: old, and comfortable. A few springs here and there might give him some trouble, but it's worlds better than trying to catch forty winks in the back seat of the SUV, and entire galaxies better than the ground. He looks down at the pillow, runs a hand over it; it's extraordinarily soft. The case, worn with years of use, and the pillow itself. Stuffed with real goose down? Very possibly.

Mike never had any particularly _refined_ tastes, but he enjoyed his pleasures where he could find them.

Mike crosses his arms. “Up to your standards, your highness?”

“It's fine,” Tom murmurs, laying it aside. Suddenly he wants to see the room it came from. He's seen the room Mike has made for himself to live and be awake in; he wants to see the one Mike has made to sleep in. How big? What kind of bed? Linens? What's in his closet, if he has one? If it's in keeping with the main room, it'll be simple and comfortable, but what else besides that? Does he have more books in there? What kinds?

Mike hasn't moved. “Seriously, what?”

Tom rolls a shoulder. Might as well make it honest again, to the extent that he can explain it at all. “It's just… It's nice. It's all just really nice.”

“Nice,” Mike repeats, his eyes narrowed, and Tom is stricken by the conviction that he's said something wrong. But when Mike speaks again it seems that the worst he's earned himself is more lightly scornful amusement. “Where the hell’d you think I'd be living? A bunker? Survivalist shack? Fuckin’ bear cave?”

Tom breathes a laugh. “Maybe the survivalist shack is the closest to what I had in mind.” He shrugs again. “I don't know, I didn't really think about it much at all.”

“But you're surprised.”

“You just…” He gnaws at a loose cuticle, looking at Mike, at the pitted floorboards, the woodstove, the window. The moon has risen and the yard is washed with pale light. That half year with him in what used to be Santiago City. Picking up the pieces. Trying to save whatever could be saved. Trying to rebuild a fucking country, an honest-to-Christ _democracy_, and he remembers wondering how nation-states don't all simply collapse within weeks of their inception, and he remembers being exhausted and bewildered and scared all the time, scared in ways he never was outside the fence, and while Florence was the strong, soothing presence she'd always been, she was in and out a lot, clearly not comfortable behind the fence even if the fence wasn't there anymore, and Mike…

Mike was there. At his side, the glowering shadow he'd always been. But he also wasn't there at all.

He was gone long before he left.

“You hated it there,” he whispers.

Mike’s voice is low. Flat. “I didn't belong there, Hobbes.”

“I know. But you also hated it. You hated where you lived, you hated the city, you hated—”

“I lived there before,” Mike says, still flat. But beneath that flatness something dark is stirring. “You know that.”

“Yeah.” Tom shakes himself, scrubs his hands over his face. He needs to head this off. This is yet another avenue that doesn't end anywhere good. Mike never spoke much about that life before—_Before_ with a capital B—and it was what he didn't say that loomed the largest. What he didn't say and the snatches of information and rumor Tom gleaned from other people, in nasty minglings of fear and hatred. For Mike. For the things Mike allegedly did.

Whatever Before was like, it was horrible. And the person who feels the most hideous fear and the most vicious hatred of it is Mike himself.

“Wasn't it different, though?” he asks softly, dropping his hands between his knees. He can't help it. He can't stay away from this. “When we were there. When it was over. When it was us. Wasn't it different then?”

_Wasn't it different enough for you to stay?_

Mike looks at him for a long moment. Shakes his head. His eyes are all shadow.

“_This_ is different, Hobbes.”

He vanishes into the depths of the cabin. Tom gazes at the space where he was for a long, long time before he returns his attention to his own bedding, toes off his boots and stretches out, pulls the blanket over himself. Stares blankly up at the ceiling, listening as the owl calls again and the early spring crickets tune up outside.

It hits him: He has to leave tomorrow. He wasn't even supposed to be here tonight, and if Mike had had his way Tom would be speeding back to civilization right now. Mike _allowed_ him to stay. Mike has _borne_ him. Suffered him. Tomorrow that ends.

He saw him, spoke to him, shared a meal with him, and it was like it used to be and it was nothing like that whatsoever, and it doesn't matter, because tomorrow it ends. And Tom knows—knows with certainty that weaves its roots into his very bones—that when he gets into the car and drives away, it'll be for the last time. He doesn't get to come back here. Not a second time. It has nothing to do with what Mike does or doesn't allow. It's deeper than that. It simply is.

_Paradise lost. _

Tom heaves a sigh and shuts his eyes. Eventually he sleeps.

~

And wakes to brilliant morning sunlight, and someone yanking the blanket off him and giving the couch a robust kick that makes it shudder. Tom yelps, jerks partially upright, blinks confusedly into a pair of sharp blue eyes.

“Get your ass up,” Mike says, turns brusquely on his heel and moves back over toward the kitchen and the table. “Your eggs are getting cold.”

Eggs.

Then he smells them, and the scent alone gets him off the couch and standing, padding in sock feet to the table and rubbing at his sleep-crusted eyes. His hair, he’s sure, is trying to escape his scalp in every direction at once.

Mike pushes a plate of golden heaven across to him. Salt. Pepper. More water; no oranges to be found here, Tom guesses, at least not for the kinds of prices Mike is probably willing to pay. There was orange juice back in the city, but he doesn't care; everything here is better, he realizes as he takes a first bite of eggs. Everything is more vivid, more solid, a more _real_ version of itself. Much of what he can get back in the city is the height of luxury compared to this place, and yet he thinks of it now, and…

_I didn't belong there_.

Mike sits down across from him and watches him in silence. Tom eats and tries to not be unsettled by being watched. But that's the thing: everything is better here, yes, but also everything is _unsettling_, shading frequently into downright _alarming_, and he doesn't know what to do with any of it, and he keeps hoping he'll figure that part out but so far it’s not happening.

For some reason his mind returns to the books. The books are a particular sticking point. The number. The variety.

_Why aren't you eating,_ he opens his mouth to ask, but instead what comes out is “Why are you memorizing the prologue to _The Canterbury Tales?_”

Mike blinks at him. Blinks, and breaks into a laugh—not loud or long, but deep in his chest, rich, and something about it catches in Tom’s gut. He could probably count on one hand the number of times he's heard Mike laugh like that, and it's good to hear, but chalk another one up on the board under Unsettling.

“I can't really _farm_ twenty-four-seven, Hobbes.” He taps his fingers lightly against the tabletop. Almost but not quite an identifiable rhythm. “Not a lotta movie theaters around here, you probably noticed. Not a lotta strip clubs. Kinda tough to hail a cab, head downtown and catch a show.” He rolls a shoulder. “Gotta fill my evenings somehow. You have a suggestion for something better?”

“No,” Tom murmurs, because he doesn't. For lack of anything better to do, he eats more egg. He's slowing down; when the eggs are gone, he understands, it won't be long before he's ushered firmly out the door.

He'd rather postpone that moment, if he can.

“You thought I was just this stupid lunkhead this entire time,” Mike says, and Tom snaps his eyes up. Mike’s voice is amiable, his expression the same, but the words are cutting. Difficult to determine whether they're meant to be so. “Did you think I could even read?”

“I didn't think you were stupid,” Tom says softly. Mike Pinocchio is, in fact, probably one of the smartest men he's ever met, but that had nothing to do with books. It was about something lower to the ground, more coldly practical, calculating, frequently brutal. Mike had his weaknesses and his blind spots, but he was always a skilled tactician, an equally skilled strategist, a nimble planner capable of rapid adjustment, excellent at reading people.

People aren't books.

“You're surprised, though, like I said.” Mike waves a hand at him. “It's fine, I get it. I know how I come off. _Blondes, big-screen TVs, and roast beef sandwiches,_ right?” The brief litany in a mocking tone, and Tom isn't entirely sure how much of the mockery is directed at him. Those were Mike’s own words, after all. “So I contradict myself. I'm large, Hobbes. I contain multitudes.”

“What's that from?” He knows he knew it once. He fumbles for it. It bothers him intensely that he can't remember it now.

“Grass,” Mike says, clipped. “Leaves, of.”

“Whitman.” Tom pokes his fork at the table. He feels triumphant and doubts he should. “Walt Whitman.”

“A-plus. Plus, plus, plus, plus. Pick your own fuckin’ college and go there.” There's a weird sing-song quality to Mike’s voice that Tom doesn't altogether like. That mockery is still there, and more and more Tom is convinced it's directed inward. There's something else here he's somehow never uncovered in all this time. Mike said _it's fine,_ but Tom wonders if it is, because to him it feels an awful lot like insecurity.

But the conversation is apparently over, because Mike is pushing his chair back and standing, reaching out to take Tom’s empty plate, plucking the fork out of his hand. “Go outside and play. I don't like leaving dishes to sit and I'm sick of listening to you.”

_Go outside and_— But that's not an instruction to leave.

In fact, it sounds very much like the opposite.

“Actually,” Mike pauses at the sink and glances at him, “take a goddamn shower. Maybe you can't smell yourself, dick, but do your constituents a favor and don't go back to them like that.”

_Take a shower_. At some point, maybe, maybe if he's very good, he'll be able to find his footing and keep it and nothing else will come along to knock him off it again.

“There's a clean towel on the rack in there,” Mike adds, turning on the faucet. “No hot water, Mr. President. Heater’s out of order. In that there isn't one.”

_In there_. He keeps repeating bits of what Mike says to him as if he needs to rewind, slow down, go frame by frame to make sure he has it all. Could be that's exactly what's going on—and _in there_ implies that there's a _there_ for him to go _into_. Still dimly bewildered, he rises and picks up his pack from beside the couch, and pads to the stump of a hallway, peers around at what he's dealing with. Tiny bathroom to his right—and now he remembers actually using it last night, waking up and needing to piss and, with some somnambulist instinct, heading toward the hallway instead of the front door. Finding what he sees now: a room just large enough for a toilet, a sink, and a shower stall. There is indeed a rack over the toilet, and there are indeed two folded towels. Neat, just like everything.

This was a vacationer’s cabin, once upon a time. Or it feels for all the world like that. A vacationer, or maybe a hunter. This wasn't built to be lived-in full time. Yet it appears to be serving that purpose admirably, for a man who doesn't want or need much.

Tom starts to enter the bathroom. Then turns and looks to the left, through the half-open door and into Mike Pinocchio’s bedroom.

Threadbare rug beside a double bed. Brass, Tom notes. Actual brass bedstead. For some reason that fits perfectly with the rest of the place. The bed hasn't been made, and that might be the first real sign of messiness that he's seen yet, which is bizarrely comforting. Sheets that might be off-white by design or by age. Blue comforter about the same shade as the curtains in the main room, and a quilt with a delicate floral pattern folded at the foot. There's no closet that he can see, but there's a dresser, and it looks antique, all glossy wood. Same wood as the one bedside table, on which sits a lantern and another couple of books. The bed itself is set against the wall beneath one of the two windows. The room is bright. Clean.

Cheerful, in the quietest possible way.

Cuff on the back of his head, not hard but with enough force to hurt, and he winces and spins around to find Mike glaring at him. “You get lost or something?”

“No,” Tom says, and starts to say something else, but Mike is reaching around him and pulling the bedroom door shut with enough force to rattle the frame. And when Mike turns to face him again, the look in his eyes—

It's not just his customary annoyance. Not impatience, not exasperation. There's hurt there.

Tom has hurt him, and he doesn't know how.

_I'm sorry,_ he might say, even if he has no idea what for, but Mike leaves him standing there and doesn't look back. A few seconds later and the water in the kitchen is running again.

~

There's something about a shower that tends to either slip Tom’s brain into a smooth kind of free-association, or drop it into total blankness. Today it's the latter, and he stands under the cold spray with goosebumps rising on his skin, looking stupidly at the soap in his hand as if he's never seen anything like it before.

The water feels good. He's always been partial to cool and even cold showers. _Because you're you_, Mike would probably say, and he wouldn't be wrong. In all the time he's known him, when Mike could get a hot shower at all he preferred it turned all the way up to just short of scalding. Interesting that his present chosen living situation makes that impossible.

This doesn't in any way strike Tom as an _ascetic_ kind of thing. So it's just interesting and he doesn't have much more in the way of thought on the matter.

He soaps himself, washes his hair. Rinses. Grabs the towel from where he's slung it over the top of the stall and briskly dries off. Pulls clean clothes out of his pack, toothbrush, razor. Makes use of them.

He pauses in the act of shaving, gazing at himself in the mirror. When he looked at Mike yesterday, he saw a man who has changed little in two years, at least outwardly, but on whom the signs of age were making themselves evident. He's never been sure precisely how old Mike is, but he's always placed him somewhere in his mid to late thirties, which gives him a few years on Tom himself. But now he gazes at his own reflection, and he wonders what Mike saw. What Mike sees.

What's changed that he isn't even aware of.

Well. He shakes out his razor, rinses and dries his face, zips up the pack. Exhales.

Time to leave.

He's ready to do it, as he steps back into the main room. All he needs are his boots and his gun and he's good to go. He's as ready as one could ever be to leave someplace like this behind forever, say a final goodbye to the man he once would have called his _friend_ simply because there was no other word for what they were to each other, turn his back on it and close the gate. Set an angel over it with a flaming sword. He can pass this way but once, all that sort of thing. It is what it is.

He pulls in a breath, ready to say something to that effect only much less elaborate, but Mike cuts in before he can speak. Mike is by the door, pulling his own boots on. Not the boots he was wearing yesterday, his old soldier’s boots; these are high and rubbery and spattered with mud.

Farmer boots.

“Fuckin’ finally.” Mike straightens up. “I shouldn't have told you to shower, you might wanna do it again after we’re done.”

Tom stares at him, nonplussed. “After we’re done with _what?_”

“You think I’m gonna let you dine and dash? No way, GI.” Mike flashes him a grin. There's something slightly grim about it. “You gotta pay your bill first. We got us some goats to milk.”

~

Mike profoundly dislikes goats. Or he did. Now he has two of them. Two minimum from what Tom heard. And two, when they pass the chicken coop and arrive at the pen behind the cabin, turns out to be three, one light gray and one dark gray and one mottled white and black. They're chewing cud, and they raise their heads when Mike and Tom approach and regard them with coolly unimpressed ungulate eyes.

Tom glances at Mike. Mike isn't so much holding the milk pail as brandishing it, and he’s scowling at the goats every bit as hard as he'd scowled at Tom yesterday afternoon by the woods. Tom gets the distinct sense that this moment is the rejoining of a very old and very bitter war.

“Right,” Mike mutters under his breath. “Let’s get this shit over with.”

“I thought you hated goats.”

Mike unlatches the pen. “I do.”

“You have three of them.”

“Better than cows.”

Tom arches a brow. “Do you hate cows too?”

Mike turns on him. The goats are ambling over to the gate, their expressions cool as ever. Their eyes seem to flick from the pail to Mike and back again, evaluating. Perhaps an angle of attack. “Are you gonna help me or not?”

Tom raises his hands, placating. But he's fighting back a smile. He doesn't understand most of this, but at least some of it is funny. “Okay, okay, Jesus. Tell me what you need me to do.”

Mike holds out the pail. “You know how to do this?”

Tom blinks at it. When Mike said _help,_ somehow he didn't imagine that meant _do the entire thing_. Does he know how? He's pretty sure he does, in fact, although it's been years and goats may not be quite the same as cows in this respect.

“I worked on a farm for a summer in high school, I milked a few cows.”

“Of course you did. Here.” Mike shakes the pail at him. “Do all three. I need to feed these assholes. Also the chickens.”

With a sigh, Tom takes the pail and surveys the goats again. He doesn't at all take to the way they're eyeing him. He saw that kind of eye in boot camp, from guys twice his size who were about to haze the shit out of him. “Do they have names?”

Mike shoots him an incredulous look. “Why the hell d’you need to know their names?”

“I dunno, I'm gonna be getting a little up close and personal with them.”

“Whatever.” Mike jabs a finger at each one. “Bitch One, Bitch Two, Bitch Three. We good?”

“We good,” Tom murmurs. Mike grunts and Tom hears the gate squeak behind him, and he's about to pull in a breath and gird his loins for whatever kind of ordeal this turns out to be, when Mike claps him on the shoulder, and Tom catches a glimpse of a smile edged with a very thin but undeniable edge of meanness.

“Godspeed, Hobbes.”

~

That was a good few months, that summer on the farm in Nebraska. Tom took the job because he needed one, and working in the Gap or Kroger or the Applebee’s in what passed for downtown held absolutely no appeal for him. He didn't grow up on a farm, and as such there was a lot of fucking up and a lot of fumbling, but the man he was working for was patient with him, and by the time the season drew to a lazy and golden close, Tom actually knew how to do a few things. He hadn't taken that job again—a few months later the man, who was on the older side, sold the farm and moved to Lincoln to live with his daughter—but the knowledge remained as such knowledge tends to, a smooth combination of higher processing and muscle memory. He was never a great hand at milking, but he did learn how to do it without spilling all over or getting kicked.

He eases past the goats, locates a stool in the small shed at the end of the pen, and looks up with mild surprise to see the goats trotting docilely toward him. The shed is filled with fresh, sweet-smelling straw. The day is bright and promises just enough and not too much warmth. Calling softly through the trees near the house, he hears what he imagines might be a woodthrush.

_Paradise,_ he thinks again, and with a confidence that astonishes him, he starts to milk the black and white one.

Mike is moving around in the background, doing things. Tom is rapidly becoming less and less aware of him. There's something meditative about milking, the even steady movements and the placidity of an animal and the sound of milk hitting the sides of the pail. The scent of the straw and the muskier, heavier smell of goat. The chickens clucking to themselves, as if they're vexed by some puzzle they're trying to work out.

This is a good place. It hits him all over again. This is a very good place, and the fact that it truly feels like _Mike’s_ place is something he continues to struggle to get his head around. But of course Mike wants to stay here. Wouldn't anyone? Who would want to leave? Surely some people, but the workings of some people’s minds have always been inscrutable to him.

Of course Mike wants to stay here. Of course Mike wouldn't go back.

Which is when he realizes that's why. That's the real reason under the other reasons. He was going to try to find a way to ask for that.

He understands now why that's impossible. He understands why there's no way he ever doesn't walk out of here alone. Or he understands as much of that as he needs to.

Shuffle of straw a few feet away. He looks up. Somehow without noticing he reached the last goat. The other two are at their trough, munching. Mike is watching him, hand on his hip and pail of what looks like chicken feed in his hand, gazing at him and the goat with an disbelieving expression on his face.

“What,” he says slowly, “the actual fuck.”

Tom smirks. Suddenly he feels smug and he doesn't particularly care to try to not show it. “Animals _like_ me, Pinocchio.”

Mike stares at him.

“They like me because I'm not an _asshole_.”

Mike stares at him. Tilts his head back and stares heavenward. _God give me strength to bear this_. “Eat shit,” he growls, and turns away. “You might as well stay for lunch.”

~

Lunch turns out to be a salad with slices of apple and a sprinkling of goat cheese, and slices of dense brown bread. Tom looks at it for a few seconds before starting to eat. Again, the persistent question.

Did he _ever_ really know this man?

They're sitting out on the porch steps this time. The day hit warm high noon without Tom realizing, and he keeps glancing at the sky, the sun dappling through the leaves. The area directly above the house is clear, and looks as if it's being purposefully kept that way. Makes sense; one wants to minimize things falling on the roof in a storm.

He was supposed to be on the road hours ago.

Mike prods him with a boot. He's changed them, changed his clothes, and Tom has avoided getting himself too dirty, although he must smell a bit like goat. A shower may not be necessary after all.

“Something wrong with it?”

“No.” Tom chews. The apples are crisp and sweet. “It’s just.”

“_What?_”

“It’s a salad,” Tom says, a bit weakly, and takes another bite.

“Oh.” And Mike actually doesn't sound especially annoyed. “Yeah, I don't eat a lotta meat these days. There's hunting, but that's kind of a pain in the ass if you don't need to do it much.”

Tom’s brow furrows. “Where do you get your protein? Besides the eggs?”

“Fish, mostly. There's a stream not too far away. Empties into a pond.”

“Ah.” Tom munches some more. Conversation languishes until he takes a bite of the bread, and it's not what he expected. He glances up. “What is this?”

“Acorn bread.”

“Ah,” Tom says again, and wishes he could think of something else to say. “It's good.”

Mike huffs but says nothing else. Then, with a kind of casualness that Tom doesn't completely buy, “So how's things back home?”

“Which home?”

Mike picks a bit of apple skin out of his teeth with a thumbnail. “City.”

“Oh, it's…” Tom shrugs uncomfortably. “It's fine. It's weird. It's just… It's really weird.” He pauses. “What’ve you heard?”

“Not a whole lot. Like you said, I only go into town a few times a year.”

“We’re still getting things back together. There's so much to do.” Tom pokes a spinach leaf. “We, uh… Think we reached a deal with, y’know, Outside. Keep the place running for the people who want to stay. And everyone else.” Calling it _The Real World_ seemed slightly ridiculous after a while. “For now, anyway.” He looks up at the sky again. “I don't think the US government is very good with _digital sovereignty_ yet.”

Mike grunts. “First case is always a crash course.”

“Yeah. And Dexter died of heart failure—wait, you were there for that. Never mind.” And in his way had mourned over the dog, although he would have decked anyone who implied as much. Another pause, longer. Then, low, “Sophie got married.”

In the periphery of his vision he sees Mike’s eyes widen a touch. “Oh?”

“Yeah. She has another kid, she's…” He sighs. “She's doing really good.”

Sometimes there's no going home. Sometimes _home_ isn't what it was supposed to be.

Mike frowns. “I can't tell whether or not you want me to say I'm sorry.”

“I don't want you to say anything. And don't be sorry, there's nothing to be sorry about.” He digs back into the salad. Eating is at least something to do with his hands. “Anyway. We’re actually having elections in a couple of months.”

“You gonna be on the ballot?”

“I haven't decided yet. People want me to be.” New wave of weariness. He's so tired of this. He wants to be done with it, he realized that some time ago, and he sees no end in sight. “People… They still look to me.”

“They were always gonna do that,” Mike says quietly.

“Yeah, but I guess I thought at some point they'd _stop_.” Tom sighs again. “I mean… I wasn't even supposed to be here. I'm no good at this, I'm not a goddamn politician.”

“Maybe what they need right now isn't a politician,” Mike says, still quiet. He's put aside his empty bowl and gone to work on the last of the bread. “Maybe they need the opposite of that. Y’know,” he continues, “from everything I've ever seen, the best people to be in power are usually the people who don't wanna be there.”

Tom turns. “You're telling me I should do it?”

“I'm not telling you anything. You were talking like they need one thing, I'm saying could be you're not right about that.”

“You always knew,” Tom murmurs, and when Mike looks sharply at him he adds hastily, “No, I mean it. You were always right about that kind of thing. You always got how it worked.”

_I could really use that right now._

“Yeah, well.” Mike flicks crumbs off his fingers. “Sometimes you learn shit you don't wanna learn.” The implication is clear: _Before_. Although Tom had never gotten the sense that Mike was any kind of statesman. Military commander, yes. Very high up. But not so much the civilian side of things.

Then again, with Santiago the line between _military_ and _state_ had always been essentially nonexistent.

“You got that right.”

The sun is sliding into afternoon. A relaxed afternoon in the fullness of April. He used to love days like this. He used to love to be out in them, doing whatever he could find to do with his hands—shit in the yard, house maintenance, working out. Anything literally under the sun. Winters in New Jersey were gray and bitter and frequently far more mud than snow, and by the time March rolled around he was close to tearing his hair out. Being deployed actually had a way of keeping some parts of him sane, for all the other ways in which he desperately wanted to be back home.

Now he spends a lot of the time inside.

“I should get going,” he says softly. All at once he can't taste the apple in his mouth anymore. “There's a lot of bad road past the town, it’ll take me forever.”

Mike says nothing.

“Hey.” Tom turns again as a thought strikes him. “What'd you do with the Chevy?”

“Ditched it.” Mike gnaws a cuticle. There's something in his tone, a faint species of strain. “‘s no good out here.”

“So how do you get into town?”

“Know what?” Mike smiles at him. It's a very different kind of smile. Small, and with no edge that Tom can discern. “I'll show you.”

~

It's not far from the house. Not more than a ten minute walk, through a thicker band of trees. Abruptly they're back out into the open, into more meadow—and directly in front of them is a large paddock bordered by an old-fashioned wooden slat fence, a stable nearby at one end.

Trotting over to greet them is a pair of horses.

Tom stops. Looks at them. Takes them in, his breath stilling in his chest. They're lovely, a chestnut and a roan, strong and with glossy, healthy hides and manes. Mike steps up to the fence and reaches for them, leaning close, stroking their noses and up between their calm eyes, murmuring something Tom can't make out.

He loves them, Mike does. Tom can see it in the touch, can hear it in Mike’s tone if not the words. Mike loves them, and he loves them in a way Tom has never seen him love anything.

He didn't know Mike was capable of loving something this way.

He moves. Joins Mike at the fence. Swallows, wants to touch them, doesn't. His hands twitch at his sides. “They're beautiful.”

Mike glances at him. That small smile is still there, open and unguarded. Happy. “Laika,” he says, touching the chestnut. “And Valentina. Found ‘em just wandering around. Pretty clear they'd been with people before, they came right up to me. Practically followed me home like dogs.” He plucks at Tom’s sleeve. “You can pet ‘em, Jesus, they look like they'll bite you?”

Normally Tom might expect this to be some kind of trap, for biting to be exactly what happens. But he lays a hand on Laika’s velvety nose and gives her a cautious stroke, and Laika nickers and pushes her nose against him.

“Told you.” Mike sounds pleased. He _looks_ pleased. Why does he look pleased that way? As if he's shared something important to him and appreciates how it's being appreciated.

Possibly because that's precisely what's happened.

“So you ride them in?”

“Whichever one seems up for it that day, yeah. They like to get out, I ride them when I can. Give their legs a stretch.” He pauses, his expression turning speculative, and appears to make some kind of decision. “You want to?”

Tom studies him. This is all so incredibly strange. “Want to what?”

“Ride ‘em.” Mike smacks his shoulder. “C’mon, I know you know how.”

Tom does know how. The memory comes to him as Mike unlatches the gate and Tom trails him as he heads for the stable. A weekend with a settlement, after they won the war. Heading out to talk to the people, try to explain to them that things had changed, that they were no longer in danger, that not only would they not be bothered but in the future they could count on some manner of protection. There were no roads. The settlement was somewhat remote by design. A woman running a subsistence-level farm lent them a couple of horses and they rode out.

That was a good day. One of the few.

Tom stands in the doorway of the stable, watches as Mike retrieves a couple of saddles. The horses have followed and are standing near the stable, watching them as well with an air of waiting. Anticipation, even; they know what this means and are looking forward to it.

Mike holds out one of the saddles. “Help me with this.” He gestures when Tom takes the saddle from him. “Take Laika, I think she likes you.”

They saddle up. Tom looks Laika over, grasps the saddle and sets his foot in the stirrup, climbs a bit clumsily up and takes hold of the reins. Valentina walks past him, heading for the open gate. Mike is stroking her neck and murmuring again.

So they ride.

Through the trees and out across another field. It's wide, wider than the others they've been in, the grass shorter and greener, and Mike urges Valentina into a brisk trot and then a cantor. A breeze sweeps across the grass and over them, stirs the horse’s manes, the sun sheening off the strands. Laika is moving easily and confidently, as if she's carried Tom a hundred times, and without him having to spur her at all she catches up to Valentina, and side by side they run out into the field, and in Laika’s muscles Tom can sense the pure pleasure of movement. Freedom.

Mike glances at him, flashes a grin, and Valentina breaks into a gallop.

Again, Tom doesn't have to do anything. Nothing but hold on as Laika follows, her brown mane streaming and the thumping impact of her hooves like dull thunder in his chest and head. The pleasure has risen into joy and it robs him of breath along with the breeze, which is now a wind. Mike and Valentina running out ahead of him and now he wants to go faster, wants to keep up, wants to stay with them, and Laika wants the same. The exhilaration of speed. Starlings explode out of the grass, calling irritably, and gradually Tom is aware that he's laughing, breathless, shocked laughter.

None of this is what he thought it would be. Consciously he didn't think it would be anything, but beneath the surface he must have had some conception of what he would be walking into, and it was not like this. It was nothing like this. He expected tension. He expected annoyance. Even anger. And he's encountered those things.

But this.

He loses track of how long they run. But at last another treeline stands in front of them and Mike turns Valentina, arcs her around, soothes her to a trot and then to a walk, and as before Laika follows her lead.

Mike is breathing hard—hard to match Valentina’s own panting, and like her flanks his skin is shining with sweat. His face is unlike anything Tom has ever seen painted on that particular canvas.

He's exultant.

His eyes land on Tom, and he seems to be emerging from somewhere, focusing, almost surprised, as if he'd completely forgotten Tom was there at all. As if he had run into a pocket world, a scenario inside the game all to himself, and he hadn't expected to leave it so soon and so suddenly.

Tom feels a bizarre impulse to apologize. As if he's somewhere he shouldn't have been.

As if he's seen something that wasn't for him to see.

Mike looks as if he's about to say something. Shakes himself, leans down and gives Valentina another stroke.

_That's my girl. That's my good girl. _

He raises his head, studies Tom for a moment. The corners of his lips are edging upward. For lack of any notion of what else to do, Tom remains where he is and is studied.

“It's good to see you like this, Hobbes,” Mike says at last.

Tom frowns. “What’re you talking about?”

“You know what I'm talking about.” Mike gestures around. At the horses, at the field, at the trees, at the starlings wheeling overhead, the sun and the streaks of cloud across the wide open sky. “This. You. In it.” He pauses. “Not back there.”

“I have to go back,” Tom says softly.

“Yeah.” Mike is still another moment or two, then gently spurs Valentina into an unhurried walk. Back toward the paddock. Back toward the cabin. “Not tonight, though.”

Tom follows, frowning again. “Why not?”

Mike gestures once more at the sky. It's mid-afternoon. “You only got a few hours of daylight left, you'll barely get anywhere before dark. C’mon.” Valentina starts to trot. Mike tosses a glance over his shoulder.

That smile.

“Your lazy ass can earn your room and board. Help out with dinner.”

~

Dinner is corn and potato chowder, and more bread. Mike sets a fire in the stove, shoves Tom in front of one of the kitchen counters and throws potatoes and an onion in front of him, thrusts a knife into his hand. No verbal instruction needed. He starts chopping.

Naturally Mike chuckles at him when the onion makes him cry. Leans on the counter next to him, speaking with mock solemnity: _I know it's sad, the poor little guy, but it's gotta be done._

And naturally it's all delicious.

The sun is deep red-gold and sunk behind the trees when they sit down at the table. Tom is still off-balance, spooning chowder into his mouth. This whole day has been a complete non sequitur. It continues to fit nothing but itself. He's feeling more and more strongly that his impression out in the field was right, only the pocket program extends beyond that moment; this entire thing is a step sideways and into a world within the world, closed off from the outside. Protected. It's almost _too_ perfect, almost like something out of a story—a fantasy of life far away from concrete and steel and glass. If it was any other context he might distrust it.

Might be casting an eye around for a stew with a severed finger in it.

Between them is silence. But the silence isn't like it was last night. It's not devoid of awkwardness, not devoid of tension, but there's less of both and more of the kind of ease they ran into out in the field, as if it's followed them back. There were nights before when it was like this. Good nights following rare good days, when they actually got something done, made some progress, and danger didn't dog every step. When they didn't have to kill anyone, didn't have to worry about being killed. When everyone lived.

They ate together in companionable silence, by a fire outside or beneath a roof, with other people or alone, and it was good.

Tom wipes chowder off the corner of his mouth. The silence isn't uncomfortable, and neither is breaking it. “You ever see Florence?”

Mike exhales. There's a lot in that exhalation. “Every once in a while.” Pause. “You?”

“Every once in a while. She left not too long after you did.” _And she actually said goodbye,_ he thinks with an unwelcome stab of bitterness. “She never liked it there either.”

“She's got her own shit to do. She's got her own life to live now.” Mike releases another breath, looks out the window at the gathering dusk. “That's how it should be.”

Tom can't summon up the will to argue with that. There's not much to argue with. Florence was with them while she was with them, but she was also always swinging off into her own mysterious orbits, disappearing for days at a time only to return and settle back in with the two of them as if she never left. Feline, Tom thought more than once. The wordless cat who walked by herself, and didn't seem to mind doing so.

But that doesn't mean he doesn't miss her.

“Everything's changed,” he says quietly, stirring his chowder. Suddenly he doesn't have as much of an appetite. “Everything's different now.”

Mike is still looking out the window. “You miss how it used to be?” His mouth twitches. “Those years were just this side of hell, Hobbes.”

“They weren't all bad.” Tom bites at his lip. “They were… They were simple. Surviving is simple.”

“The fuck’re you talking about? Surviving is a hot fuckin’ mess.”

“Yeah, but it's an _uncomplicated_ hot fucking mess.” Tom scrubs a hand over his face, sets down his spoon. “I'm not explaining it very well, am I?”

“You're really not.” Mike prods his bowl. “Eat, you're skin and bones.”

Tom rolls his eyes and picks up his spoon again. “Thanks, Mom.”

Mike shoots nothing back. His eyes have swung away from the window and the lantern light is flooding into them again, and he sucks a stray bit of chowder off his forefinger, thoughtful. Then suddenly he's pushing back from the table, rising, striding to the kitchen.

Tom watches him, confused. “What’re you doing?”

Mike pauses in the act of opening one of the lower cabinets. “You know what your problem is.”

“According to you I have a lot of them.”

Mike straightens. In his hand is a large bottle two-thirds full of something deeply and richly honey-colored. “You're too goddamn sober.”

~

The honey-colored stuff turns out to be scotch. It turns out to be tremendously good scotch, aggressive yet somehow smooth and very peaty. Tom examines the bottle; he doesn't recognize the name, but he'd be willing to bet a can of gasoline that it once went for not a dollar less than ninety and probably more.

“Where'd you get this?”

Mike smirks. “Wouldn't you like to know.”

“I would, actually.”

“Didn't I always have ways of getting things?”

“You did.” Tom takes another sip and his eyes flutter closed. He didn't use to be much of a scotch drinker, until he discovered that he'd never had really good scotch. One of the benefits of his position is people give him gifts. “They were usually awful.”

“Christ, shut up and drink it.”

Tom does. Another few sips and he's suffused with a warm, pleasant glow; it's a good thing, he muses, that he's drinking it on a relatively full stomach. It would be far too easy to only realize how fucked up you were on something like this when it was far too late to do anything about it. Not that it's the kind of alcohol one should gulp down.

Mike hadn't been wrong. This kind of buzz is welcome.

He cocks his head. “Were you saving this or something?”

Mike shrugs. “I don't tend to drink alone. ‘s just good to have around.”

Tom partially hides his smile with his tumbler. Lord, he already feels so much better about everything. “In case old friends drop by for dinner.”

Eyeroll. “Don't flatter yourself, dick. It's unbecoming,”

“What, we weren't friends?” _Weren't_. Past tense. Slight aching twinge. He doesn't want that shit intruding. “What would you call us, then?”

Mike doesn't speak. His expression says _are you fucking kidding me?_ as clearly as if he had said the words aloud. He sips his scotch.

“I think we were friends. I think we _are_ friends. You're feeding me and letting me sleep on your couch.” He raises the glass in an almost-toast. “You're sharing your really fucking good scotch.”

Mike shakes his head. Tom has seen this look so many times before. It's so wonderfully familiar. “Y’know, this was all a terrible mistake.”

“What was?”

“I mean, basically you. The whole thing.” Mike takes another sip. It's closer to a swallow. He should slow down. “You ruined my fuckin’ life, you’re aware of that.”

“Bullshit. I saved your ass a lotta times.”

“Only so you could get me almost killed again.”

“_Almost_ isn't _all the way,_” Tom points out primly. “Anyway, you would've almost gotten yourself killed plenty of times without me.” Without entirely intending to do it, he's on his feet and making his way toward the bookshelf, swaying very slightly. Maybe the full stomach is less of a significant variable than he thought. “You like poetry.”

The pressure of Mike’s gaze on his back. “I like lots of things.”

“Yeah, but you _really_ like poetry.” Tom gestures with his tumbler. It's almost empty. He's feeling bold. “Look at all you've got.”

He glances back. Mike is propping his elbow on the table, his head leaning on his hand, and he would appear to be exasperated beyond measure if there wasn't a faint twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “Hobbes, sit down before you fall the fuck down. You spill any of that on the books and you _will_ regret it.”

“I'll sit down,” Tom says, all drunken stubbornness, “if you read me one of your favorites.”

Mike looks at him.

Tom half turns to face him more squarely. “I'm serious. Tell me. Read me something.”

“I'm not reading you shit, dick.”

“Why not?” Tom does lean against the back of the couch, a concession to gravity and his gently spinning head. “Why're you embarrassed? I'm not gonna judge you,” he adds, and has moderate trouble with the next to last word. “I won't tell a soul. Stays here. All of what happens, it stays in here.”

“Hobbes.” Mike is getting to his feet. He's swaying, maybe just a bit, although not nearly as much. He always could hold his liquor better, and Tom always did find that vaguely provoking. “Sit. Down.”

Tom thrusts his chin out in a mockery of belligerence that he doesn't mean. Mostly. “Make me.”

Mike is coming toward him. Tom drains the glass and sets it carefully down on one of the shelves, tries to push away from the couch with maximum available dignity, and the floor swings sideways and rushes up to meet him as if it's extremely glad to see him. He's bemused by this, wondering what's going to happen next, and then a strong arm is around him and his fall is partially arrested, or at least slowed, and when he hits the floorboards it's not nearly as hard as it might have been.

It's even sort of comfortable down here. Comfortably stable.

Comfortable weight of a body on top of his.

Mike is very close to him. Very close indeed. Braced up on one hand, staring down at him with wide eyes, blue darkened into near-black. Knee between Tom’s thighs. Tom smells scotch and sweat and straw and outside.

It's all nice. All of it.

He raises a hand, touches the roughness of Mike’s jaw as if he's not sure what to make of it, because he's not, although he's pretty certain that it's one of the nice things. Mike has a nice face. Tom wonders if he knows that. For some reason he doubts it.

“Pinocchio…”

Sharp intake of breath and Mike is practically hurling himself up and away, sitting back on the floor, and as Tom pushes himself up and peers at him through the shadows, he'd swear that Mike looks freaked out.

He'd swear that Mike looks almost scared.

“It's okay,” Tom murmurs, rubbing a hand down his face. Isn't it? It should be. They're friends. They've been close before. All those freezing nights. “Pinocchio, it's fine, it's—”

Mike scrambles clumsily to his feet, turns away. The tension in his shoulders is like tension in Tom’s own. It's bleeding across the space between them and into him. “Go to bed, Hobbes. Before you puke all over everything.”

Tom attempts to get up. Groping for the couch’s armrest, it takes him a couple of tries. By the time he's up, Mike is at the entrance to the hallway. He's not looking back.

“Mike,” Tom says softly, and Mike pauses. Freezes. One hand on the wall as if to steady himself.

Doesn't turn.

Then, as is his way, without a word he's gone.

~

Tom doesn't remember much of the rest of the night. He remembers drinking a little more; Mike left the bottle on the table and there's no one to tell him not to, and everything still feels just a smidge too real. He sits on the couch, the lantern beside him, and he gazes at the last of the coals in the stove. Before he passes out, he's fairly sure that he gets up and wobbles to the bookshelf one more time, fumbles over the titles in the poetry section and, guided by an intoxicated impulse he won't try to understand, he slides out one of the slim collections. He doesn't recall the name of the poet, but later, awake in gray dawn and feeling the lurching approach of his hangover, he does retain one snatch of verse. And in fact it's more than retention; it refuses to leave him, instead spinning around and around inside his head like the sickening spin of the room.

_Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us. _

_But they won't_, his aching mind protests. _They won't. No one will remember. No one will remember anything. In the end it won't matter what deals we make with Outside, because the computers will shut down and the lights will go dark and this world will go out like a candle and all of us will go out with it. _

_And maybe that's how it should be._

~

The dawn was gray. The morning brightens into another shade of gray, as dim as the day before was bright and sunny. Tom stands at the window near the bookshelves, a glass of water in his hand, desperately trying to rehydrate and in the meantime gazing out at the day and ignoring the way the light batters against his retinas.

Or perhaps he's punishing himself for something.

He hears the bedroom door opening. The bathroom door closing. Water running in the sink. After a little while, Mike emerges, and he's bringing his own dark cloud with him. Tom can feel it before he sees him, and his heart sinks into his diaphragm; this, also, is all too familiar.

Yesterday was one of the good days. This is going to be one of the bad ones.

Mike slams around in the kitchen. Tom silently approaches the table, sits down. Without a word and with a clatter, a plate of eggs is tossed in front of him. Tom picks at them, his stomach groaning that this might not be such a good idea. They don't look as good as they did yesterday, and that might not be only the hangover.

Mike won't look at him.

He did something wrong. Tom did. He’s sure of it. What was it? The night before is a swirling haze. Something happened. There was the scotch, and then talking and what started as friendly teasing—at least on his end—and then it went somewhere else. And there was the floor. That part really isn't so clear. Something about the floor. He glances at the patch of floor he senses was involved; it looks no different from the rest of the floor.

He tries to take a bite of egg. It goes okay. He glances out the window.

“Looks like it's gonna rain.”

Mike grunts.

Tom sighs. “You need any help with anything this morning?”

Another grunt. Shake of the head. “I got it.” Mike’s voice is flat, almost dead. Does he have a hangover too? He doesn't tend to get those, at least not too badly. Perhaps something has changed. Perhaps he lost his tolerance.

“You sure? It'd go faster, if the rain is—”

“I said I _got it,_” Mike snaps, and Tom falls silent.

He feels like a kicked dog. Again that feeling of wrongness, guilt, something awfully like shame—and why? What for? What did he _do_ that was so offensive?

He knows better than to try to push Mike to talk it out. When Mike was pissed off at him there was never anything to do about it other than wait out the storm and hope everything would be okay when it eventually dissipated.

“I'll go,” he says softly. “I should get out of here before it storms anyway.”

Grunt. “Suit yourself.”

Mike eats his own eggs. He eats them sulking in the kitchen, tosses the dishes into the sink and stomps to the door, pulls on his rubber farmer boots and leaves with another slam. Leaves Tom behind, leaves Tom staring after him with his empty plate in front of him.

No goodbye.

Typical.

~

Which might be why, in a fit of frustrated contrariness, he doesn't go. He stays. He puts his dishes much more carefully in the sink, looks at them for a moment, then washes them and sets them in the drainer. He goes to the couch and lies down. His head is better but still throbbing; at least the nausea has faded into the background and he thinks he’ll probably be able to hold onto to the eggs. It might be a bad idea to set out for the road in this state anyway. Might be better to wait it out like the storm. Surely the rain won't last all day.

But he shouldn't stay here. He did something wrong. He did something very wrong and now Mike is storming, and he has no idea how long that'll go for, and just as it always did all those years past, it's making him so tired.

Those were hellish years, and Mike Pinocchio could be utter hell to live with.

He slings his arm over his eyes, groans. This is awful. Maybe this was, in fact, a terrible mistake.

All of it.

At some point he falls asleep.

~

He doesn't know how much later it is when he emerges from thick unconsciousness—feeling muzzy and confused but otherwise better. He blinks at the ceiling; the light has changed. Darkened. Distant rumble of thunder. The wind is picking up, hissing through the trees outside. This is going to be more than just rain or even a standard storm; he recognizes in that rumble one of the harbingers of the fiercer storms of late spring and summer.

It's possible that staying here truly wasn't the worst idea in the world after all.

What woke him up? The thunder? Probably not; it's still low, far away. Something else. Movement elsewhere in the cabin; Mike has returned, and he's not stomping or slamming or throwing things. He's being quieter. Trying not to wake Tom up? Not waking him up, snarling at him that he was supposed to be gone, that he said he would be, flinging him out the door. Not doing that. Left him to sleep.

Has the storm passed? Or merely let up for a brief period before it starts raging again?

Movement again. Bedroom? He thinks so. Suddenly he has to piss with a force that startles him, and he gets unsteadily to his feet and slouches toward the hallway and the bathroom. Leans over the toilet with his hand braced against the wall and stays there for what feels like hours. The nausea is threatening again; fuck, he dared to think he was done with it. More fool him.

He flushes, washes his hands because he wasn't birthed in a barn, turns, opens the door—

Freezes.

Mike. That's not what makes him freeze. What makes him freeze is how he's _seeing_ Mike, _what_ he's seeing—and it shouldn't be enough to hit him like this, shouldn't be enough to make him stare as his blood turns to frost crystals. It's just Mike without a shirt on. He's seen that a thousand times. He's seen Mike bare-ass naked; they never had any privacy out there and they were both military anyway. You get used to those things.

Mike’s back is to him.

Mike’s back is a hideous mass of scars. Dark, vicious lines, twisted and crisscrossed, over and over each other. Tom has seen scars like that. He's seen them in pictures of slaves, their backs turned to the camera, the outrageous, outraging evidence of whipping upon whipping upon whipping. Welts that rose and broke open and bled and healed badly.

_Someone beat you,_ he thinks. _Holy Christ, Mike, someone beat you and they kept on doing it and they wouldn't stop._

_You couldn't make them stop. _

Mike has frozen too, his hand on the bedroom doorknob. His hair is damp from the shower. Slowly, very slowly, terribly slowly, he turns.

His face is even more terrible. His face is the storm.

_Run_, a voice in Tom’s head whispers—tight, nearly frantic. _Run, shit, just get out of here, you do _not _want to be here for what's coming next_. But he's never made a practice of listening to that voice, especially not where this man is concerned, and he pulls in a breath, licks his dry lips, speaks.

“What happened to you?”

Mike stares at him, jaw working. Tom has not the remotest idea of how he'd even begin to describe what's in those awful blue eyes.

Mike never talked about the worst things. He never put them to voice. He always gave the impression, unspoken but piercingly clear, that if he ever did, if he ever spoke in any detail about the inferno of Before, something horrible would happen and no one would be able to prevent it, least of all himself.

“Pinocchio.” His hand is rising. God, shit, _no_, that is the most idiotic thing he could be doing right now. His hand is rising and reaching out, because behind his eyes, entirely against his will, a filmstrip is rolling, flickering black and white like a very old movie, and the blood is oil-black as it streaks Mike’s skin and drips onto the floor, and the film should be silent but there are screams, there are so many screams, there are so many many screams and Tom is trembling with horror and rage and wants to jam his hands against his ears to make the screaming stop.

Mike left and this happened to him. If he had stayed. If.

A world of _If_.

Mike gasps and flinches, hand flying up. As if to try to ward off another blow. More nausea surges, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the hangover.

“What happened?” This time it's not a whisper. It's almost a growl, all that rage in him like the oncoming thunder, and part of him is crying that the rage is _bad_ right now, the rage is the last thing he wants to put out in front of himself, but he can't help it. Someone hurt Mike. Someone hurt his friend. It's as simple and as brutally pure as that. “Tell me. Tell me what _happened_ to you, Mike.”

_Tell me who did this so I can fucking kill them._

Mike shakes his head. Once. He's dangerous right now; Tom knows this. He's dangerous and he might not discriminate in who he's dangerous to. “Shut up.”

“Mike.”

Through clenched teeth: “Shut. Up.”

“Why won't you tell me?”

“Because it's _not your fucking business!_”

And there it goes.

Exploding—in here, outside and overhead, and Tom almost laughs because it's so perfect. The thunder doesn't rumble; it _roars_, all that rage Tom is feeling, and the wind howls against the cabin and furious rain lashes the windows.

Lashes.

“It's not your fucking _business,_ Hobbes!” Advancing on him. Herding him back into the main room, hands clenched into fists as if he might use them. Mike’s anger is volcanic, practically beaming out red through his skin. “It's _never_ been your fucking business! None of it! Jesus fucking _Christ_.” Tom passes the chair and Mike reaches it and in a single violent shove it's on its side on the floor. “You _always_ fucking do this. You're a nagging little _bitch,_ and you know why I left? Huh? You know why?”

Hands raised. Now he's the one fending it off. _Run_. “Mike—”

Mike’s voice plunges back into that flat, cold deadness. He's looming; he was never that much bigger than Tom but now he seems like a giant. A giant shaking with wrath that threatens to rip him apart from the inside.

“I left,” he says, and each word is like a whip striking skin and cutting in, “because I couldn't fucking take it anymore. I couldn't fucking take you.” He stabs a trembling finger at the door. “Get. The fuck. Out.”

_Go_. No. “Mike, _please_.”

“_Now_.”

The thunder screams and lighting rips the bruised sky open. And Tom gets out.

~

He's far enough into the woods to have lost sight of the cabin when he realizes that he left his pack behind. It takes him about seven tenths of a second to decide it's not worth it to go back for it. He doesn't need the clothes. Food, he can find on the way.

His gun, though.

Fuck.

He pushes on. Under the trees it's nearly dark enough to be dusk. He was soaked to the skin the second he stepped out from beneath the shelter of the porch, and his only comfort now is that at some point you just can't get any wetter.

His keys? His car keys? He fumbles at his pants—jingle. They're in his pocket. Okay, that's something. That's enough. No one came at him on the way here, maybe he can do all right unarmed.

No one came at him except Mike.

He makes his way up a slight incline. Did he go down this way before? Is this correct? He's gotten all turned around and he doesn't know anymore. Water is streaming down the slope, carrying leaf litter with it, and it sloshes muddy around his boots and he almost slips, and catches himself on a sapling that comes perilously close to bowing under his weight. Shit, he could wander around forever out here. All of it looks the same.

Lighting snakes across the sky overhead, blinding. This is not a good storm to be out in. Maybe he should have fought back, or tried harder to calm things down enough to allow him to do like he planned and wait it out. It would probably have been hopeless but he could have tried. Now he's out here lost in the fucking woods in a storm that does have the capacity to kill him if the most unfortunate series of events happen in the most unfortunate possible way. Then again, what else is new.

He would feel so much better if he had his gun.

It doesn't feel right out here. Something is wrong.

He spins, scanning around, hugging himself. Chill is setting in; terrific, all he needs to cap off this adventure is to die of exposure. This is so stupid. This is so massively, humiliatingly stupid, and really, it's almost appropriate. Again, it's almost perfect. An absurd, tragicomic ending to an absurd, tragicomic story. Is Mike going to find him at all? If he dies he digitizes. No body to find. Mike might never know.

Mike might never fucking care.

_You know that isn't right. _

Does he? He doesn't know anything. He sure as hell doesn't know where he's going. He staggers on, picking a direction at random because why not, what else is he supposed to do—

And he hears the growl.

That was not thunder.

It comes out of nowhere. An enormous shaggy shadow, bestial musk sharp in the wet. Tom yelps and stumbles backward, gaping up at it, thinking _this is so stupid this is so stupid this is so stupid_ as the bear rears and roars again, swiping a paw through the air—gleam of black sickle claws. Flash of teeth. Foam on its muzzle. Rabies?

Or did he simply do what he does and blunder into the wrong place?

He stumbles again. Tries to turn, tries to run, and a tangle of roots surges out of the treacherous ground and agony lances up his leg from his ankle and he crashes down with a pained grunt, rolling and scrambling backward in the leaves and the mud as the bear comes for him. He's weirdly calm. It was always going to end in some way. This isn't really so much worse than all the other deaths he's narrowly escaped. If he had time he could think of plenty of others.

He doesn't have time.

The bear is over him, blotting out the world. He closes his eyes.

It's all right.

A huge _crack_ breaks through the air, and it takes him a few seconds to realize two things: First, that he's not dead.

Second, that was not lightning.

The bear rocks back, whirls, roaring again and rushing forward. Tom looks past it, stunned, and catches the gleam of the rifle’s scope as Mike aims and fires again, and Mike has always been a good shot, better than most, and the bear is feet away from him when the side of its skull shatters and it groans and goes limp and collapses into the mud.

Tom sits, motionless, and for a singular and unquantifiable span of time nothing moves. Even the raindrops seem to freeze in midair.

Then everything slams into gear and it's too fast for him to process; one instant Mike is lowering the rifle and Tom is looking at him and in the next instant strong arms are wrapped around him and dragging him in tight against a solid body, hot breath against his neck, a voice hissing in his ear _fuck you motherfucker you stupid fucking prick don't you ever do that to me don't you fucking ever_

He pulls away. Mike doesn't stop him. But Mike is still very close, leaning over him, hands framing his face, shaking. Shaking harder than before.

“Can you walk?”

Tom swallows. He experimentally flexes his ankle and winces. “I don't know.”

“C’mon,” Mike says grimly, and again that strong arm sliding under him and around him, hauling him up and ignoring his short cry of pain. “We’ll fuckin’ make it work.”

~

They do. Somehow. They did.

Tom sits on the couch, slumped over his knees. His boots are off. He doesn't like the way his ankle is swelling, but it's not swelling as much as it might be, although perhaps he only needs to give it more time. Mike is moving around in the bathroom, returning and tossing a towel at him without a word. Toweling off himself, for all the good it's doing with his soaked clothes, crouching in front of the stove and starting to build up the fire.

Tom attempts to make any headway at all regrading dryness with his clothes on, gives up and strips off his shirt. His pants he supposes he can take care of later.

Mike’s shirt, he feels fairly certain, is not coming off.

Silence. The crackle of the fire. Mike is gazing into it, sitting back, his knees drawn up against his chest. It's possible that he's not blinking. Outside the thunder continues its nearly constant growling, but it seems to be letting up a little, and the rain isn't coming down quite so hard.

It has to be nearly evening.

_I'm sorry_, perhaps he should say. Or _thank you_. Or _are you all right_. But he says none of these things. He says nothing at all, sitting there with the wet towel in his hands and shivering less and less as the warmth from the stove fills the room.

Something has changed.

Mike gets up. He walks to the bookshelves, and as Tom swivels at the waist to watch him, he retrieves a thin book and looks down at it for a moment, as if deliberating over it. He must come to some kind of decision, because he moves back to the stove and sits down and opens it. He's facing Tom now, his head lowered and his face awash in shadow, lit only in red-gold outline with the fire at his back.

“You saved my life,” he says softly, scarcely audible above the rain and the thunder, and Tom is about to gently correct him, remind him that he was the one doing the saving, but he's still talking, and it's immediately clear that something else is happening. 

> You saved my life,_ he says _I owe you everything.  
_You don’t, I say, you don’t owe me squat, let’s just get going, let’s just get gone, but he’s_  
_ relentless,_  
_keeps saying_ I owe you,_ says_ Your shoes are filling with your own damn blood,  
you must want something, just tell me, and it’s yours.  
_ But I can’t look at him, can hardly speak,_  
_I took the bullet for all the wrong reasons, I’d just as soon kill you myself, I say._  
_You keep saying _I owe you, I owe…_but you say the same thing every time._  
_ Let’s not talk about it, let’s just not talk._

The words come out in a hard monotone, rushing a little, hurried, but it doesn't sound like nerves; it sounds as if the words are stumbling over themselves in their eagerness to get out of him and into the air, as if they've been kept back for a long, long time and they can't wait anymore.

And it hurts. It hurts to hear it. Worse than his ankle, worse than anything, because Mike is _hurting_, each word is like a blow against him, but he's not putting his arms up to ward them off. He's sitting here and he's taking them, each one, bearing them like he almost wants to. 

> —_we always win and we never quit, see, we’ve won again, here we are at the place_  
_ where I get to beg for it_  
_where I get to say _Please, for just one night, will you lay down next to me, we can leave our  
clothes on, we can stay all buttoned up?  
_ or will I say_  
Roll over and let me fuck you till you puke, Henry, you owe me this much, you can indulge me  
this at least, can’t you?_ but we both know how it goes. I say _I want you inside me  
_ and you hold my head underwater, I say _I want you inside me  
_and you split me open with a knife._

_Oh_, Tom thinks. _Oh. Oh. _

_Oh my God. _

_Give me bullet power_, Mike murmurs. 

> _Give me power over angels. Even when you’re standing up_   
_you look like you’re lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby? Do I have to_   
_ tie your arms down?_   
_Do I have to stick my tongue in your mouth like the hand of a thief, like a burglary_   
_like it’s just another petty theft? It makes me tired, Henry. Do you see what I mean?_   
_ Do you see what I’m getting at?_

_I think I see_, he wants to say, but his throat is locking up and his eyes are stinging. Part of him wants to lurch to his feet, ankle or no ankle, and stumble back out into the night and the storm and let it do whatever it wants to him. But he won't. He’ll sit here and take the blows along with Mike, take each one, because he imagines how it might have been when it happened and the very worst part of it as far as he's concerned is that Mike was taking the blows alone.

Mike’s voice is trembling now. Trembling like his hands. 

> _You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it out of me, and with this bullet_   
_lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because_   
_ it’s all I have,_   
_because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your_   
_slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this_   
_ bullet inside me_   
_‘cause I couldn’t make you love me and I’m tired of pulling your teeth._

_How_, Tom thinks. _How could I not have known. How could I not have seen it. _

_Did I ever know this man? _

_If I didn't, how much of that was my fault?_

> _If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand._   
_Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky? Do you want to go home now?_   
_There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet_   
_ staring up at us like we’re something interesting._

Huge, ragged breath. Mike hasn't been breathing. Mike hasn't been able to breathe. For years and years, Mike hasn't been able to breathe. 

> _This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. _
> 
> _Grab an end, pull hard,_   
_and make a wish._

The book drops limply into Mike’s lap. He's staring, staring at nothing, or so it seems from what Tom can see, the shine of his eyes all gold and red and flickering like little flames. Staring into the past. Hurtling back into it, clawing at the walls, unable to stop it from happening, inexorable as a beating.

“I had to leave,” Mike whispers. “I had to. I couldn't take it anymore. I meant that. It was too much.”

His eyes flicker more and Tom feels him focusing, fixing him with that unblinking gaze. There's firelight spilling across the floor. It might be blood.

“You were too much.” He smiles and it's anguished. “In the end. I couldn't win.”

Echo: _We always win and we never quit. _

All at once he's getting to his feet, turning. Moving toward the hallway like a sleepwalker, a little stilted, a little stiff. No more words, no goodbyes, and Tom wonders if he means for there to be any, if he has even the thinnest outlines of a plan for what to do next or if that was him setting fire to all his plans at once, scattering the ashes in front of Tom and walking away.

It's not difficult to imagine him setting fire to the cabin and disappearing into the night.

_Paradise lost. _

“Mike.”

Like before, he freezes. Hand on the wall to steady himself. Tom is struggling to his feet, wavering, gritting his teeth against the pain, and as Mike turns he's stumbling forward, and his stupid fucking ankle is giving out under him but strong arms are there to catch him, holding him up, and Mike is very close.

Tom lifts a hand and ghosts his fingers down Mike’s cheek to his jaw. The rough stubble. The skin of his cheek is still glistening and slick, and as Tom watches and listens in absorbed fascination, Mike’s eyes flutter closed and a wrenched, hopeless sound escapes him.

“Don't.”

“Why not?”

It's too much like a sob, too much like a bloodless agonized smile. “Just don't.”

“I want to.” He's cold. Even with the fire he's cold. Mike is warm. Mike is warm and he's _here_, and maybe Paradise is lost and can’t ever be regained but that doesn't mean there isn't something here worth saving.

And if he never really knew this man, maybe he'd like to.

“Let me,” he murmurs, and he isn't certain of what he's telling Mike to let him do until he brushes their lips together, barely there at all, easing into stillness again.

The storm explodes, and it's not like before.

He nearly falls again, and Mike is nearly unable to hold him up, because Mike is _kissing_ him, fierce and hungry, tongue thrusting past his lips and into his mouth and curling alongside his, running across his teeth, as if it wants to explore him and can't slow down enough to do so properly. _Maybe later,_ Tom thinks dizzily, _maybe we can do it like that later,_ and they're collapsing onto the couch in a tangle of arms and legs and mouths, his fingers raking into in Mike’s damp hair and his teeth scraping across lips, seeking to bite. Kissing Sophie was never like this. He never thought he would ever kiss _anyone_ like this, be kissed like this, like it's fighting, like it's violence, like Mike wants to eat him the fuck alive.

_Do I have to stick my tongue in your mouth like the hand of a thief, like a burglary, like it’s just another petty theft?_

_It's not a theft if I'm giving it to you_, and he might say that, because Mike moans and runs a grasping hand up his naked side, blunt nails digging in, making him arch and gasp and feel the hardness pressing against his hip.

He's not cold anymore.

_Please,_ he could be whispering, _please, I want_— What he wants is to arch again, hard himself and aching with it, rubbing himself shamelessly against Mike’s thigh, fumbling a hand down between them and squeezing and gasping with something like amazement when Mike releases a soft cry and bucks into his palm.

_Jesus,_ he thinks, _we haven't even gotten our pants off yet. _

Yet.

So they take care of that.

Or Mike takes care of that. Tom helps as much as he can but the ankle makes it difficult, and he squirms and is sure he's laughing with how ridiculous it is, hears Mike laughing too, a healthy amount of it could be sheer disbelief, and then naked and the blur of their clothes tossed aside and Mike is lifting him bodily up and turning him around, pulling him into his lap, and the fact is that the pain in his ankle is pretty much constant now, and the fact is that he's not even in the remote vicinity of giving a shit, especially not when Mike curls an arm around his waist and surges against him, biting at his collarbones, reaching between them with his other hand and taking him and lining up their cocks in a way that utterly unravels him.

He doesn't have to think. He's moving. They're moving together, and it's awkward and strange and unfamiliar and it does hurt and it's fucking perfect, and his head falls back as he clutches at Mike’s shoulders and sobs his name, grinding against him, cupping the back of his head and pulling him in harder as Mike licks the rain off his neck.

_I'm gonna_— He doesn't want it to be so fast. He doesn't want it to be over. He might not be able to come back here once it's over. But he can't stop it, his rhythm stuttering and his muscles going rigid, shuddering, and he's groaning and coming in a hot rush all over Mike Pinocchio’s hand.

Everything stops. The storm is quieting outside, rolling slowly away to dump its fury on someone more deserving.

Mike is holding him so tight he's struggling to breathe, mouthing silent words against his throat. Hands moving mindlessly over Tom’s back as Tom slumps onto his chest.

“Jesus,” Mike breathes. He sounds shellshocked. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ.”

“It's okay,” Tom whispers. This is the right thing to say just now, fingers stroking through Mike’s hair. Soothing him. Easing his frightened quivering. “It's okay, it's alright. You didn't steal it.”

Mike doesn't ask him what he means.

The storm has passed and blown the sky clear. Outside the stars are beginning to shine through.

~

Mike helps him to the bed and he gets to go back and there's time.

More clumsiness, more laughter—laughing through the pain, because something about this is so _funny_, and he rolls onto his back and laughs again when Mike lays him heavily down on the bed. Mike bends over him, kisses him long and deep and slow, then pulls away and steps back, and Tom notes with dim bemusement that he's still half hard, his dick bobbing between his legs.

Dicks really are such ludicrous things.

“Don't go anywhere,” Mike says huskily, and leaves him.

Tom isn't worried. He knows he'll come back. He feels drunk again, buzzing and dizzy and very relaxed, only this time he doubts he’ll have to worry about a hangover. Some other kind of discomfort, perhaps, and he really should ice the ankle if there's anything to ice it with. And Mike reappears from the dark with a small bottle in his hand, and when Tom sees it in the light of the rising moon—olive oil from the kitchen—he understands what's about to happen next, and his breath hitches, his eyes widening.

Mike sets the bottle down on the bedside table, leans over him again. Crawls onto the bed, strokes a hand down his chest. There's reverence in the way Mike is touching him now. Still hunger, he hasn't come and he must be aching for it, but in spite of that Mike is touching him as if he's something special, not fragile but infinitely precious, and again Tom thinks of the agonized rawness of the poem.

You don't talk like that about someone if all you want is to fuck them.

“We don't have to,” Mike murmurs, kisses him again. “We don't have to do that if you don't want to, it's alright.”

It's terrifying. He supposes it often is for people who have never done it this way. Or not terrifying but anxiety-inducing; if he feels terror in this moment it's coming from some other source. But the terror isn't all he feels; he's come and there's no way he gets hard again for a while but now he's feeling an entirely different level of desire.

It's about giving, not taking. Maybe it's about being taken.

_I want you inside me. _

“I want to,” he says softly. He keeps saying that. He’ll say it as many times as he has to before it takes. “I want to do it, I just—” He swallows. “Go slow.”

Mike smiles against his neck. “No other way to do it.”

Mike’s slippery fingers sliding into the crack of his ass make him stiffen, make him inhale sharply, but he nods when Mike flicks a questioning look up at him, lifts his legs and spreads himself wider. There's something almost humiliating about this position, the intensity of the exposure, but that reverence hasn't left Mike’s touch. If anything it's increasing by orders of magnitude as a single finger circles Tom’s asshole and carefully presses.

“Does it hurt?” Tom breathes.

A question a child would ask.

Mike is curled against his side, head bent, and his lips graze Tom’s sternum. “It shouldn't. Might be a little uncomfortable at first. It gets better.” Another ghost of a kiss. “You tell me if it hurts, I'll stop.”

“Okay.”

“Relax. Push against me.”

“Okay,” he repeats, and the word twists off into a gasp as Mike presses into him.

He wanted to go slow. It's slow. It's very, very slow, and he might have thought Mike would be impatient, demanding, but Mike seems content to take all the time necessary, gradually slipping deeper, sliding back and in again, after a while of that, adding another finger when Tom gives him a nod. He was right, it is uncomfortable, but so much of that is in the newness, and the discomfort eases into a strange and wonderful fullness, a sense of being invaded that isn't unpleasant at all, and a humming pleasure deep in his core that he believes might get even better with time.

People wouldn't do this if it didn't feel good.

It feels good.

More of it. Mike works him open bit by bit and Tom’s breathing slows as he falls into an extraordinary relaxation, all of him unfurling, loose at the cellular level. Nodding dreamily when Mike asks him in a soft and slightly trembling voice if he's ready, allowing himself to be shifted and arranged, looking down to find Mike kneeling between his spread legs and lifting him up a little higher with one hand, lining himself up with the other.

“Slow,” Tom murmurs, and it’s the most natural thing in the world, the most fully in keeping with his character, when Mike leans down and presses a kiss to his brow.

“Slow.”

But Mike tenses up the second he enters him, tightens, gripping Tom’s thighs; Tom blinks up at him, studying, looking for the problem. Mike’s head is tipped back and his face is twisted into what appears worryingly like pain, and that’s peculiar; when Tom asked whether it would hurt, he never suspected it might hurt from that side.

“Mike?”

Mike drops his head between his shoulders and pulls in a shuddering breath. “It's alright. I'm alright. I'm—” He rolls his hips, not quite a thrust, and breaks off into a harsh, helpless moan.

“You don't know.” His eyes are open and staring down, dark and glittering. “You don't have any fuckin’ idea how long I wanted this.”

“Tell me.”

“_Shit_. Years.” Mike moves in him again, deeper, slides back, in. That pleasure is rising again, and then it flares when Mike hits a different angle, and Tom whimpers and rocks, trying to get it to happen again.

“Years you wanted to fuck me?”

“Years I wanted—everything.” Mike folds down, closer above him, at the same time pressing Tom’s legs back so far his hamstrings burn. “Oh my God. Oh my God, you feel so _good_.”

Tom only moans, gropes over his head for the brass bars. He does. He does feel good. He feels good in a way he didn’t imagine was possible, feels whole in a way he didn't believe he wanted, but it's another thing he should have realized, because it's been a goddamn lifetime since anyone touched him even vaguely like this way.

No one has ever touched him this way.

He's not hard yet, at least not fully. But that doesn't matter. It's not about taking. He has faith now that if he wants more of that pleasure, Mike will see that he gets it. For now there's the deep, wonderful burn of Mike’s cock thrusting inside him, Mike making a place for himself there like he's made a place in here. _For us, it's for us;_ he clenches his hands around the bars and whispers at Mike to fuck him, fuck him harder, _fuck me like you wanted to_.

It is hard by the end. Not especially fast, not pounding, but hard, nearly uncomfortable again, but all Tom can focus on is Mike above him, tensing and thrusting one more time and sobbing with what sounds more than anything else like pure _relief_ as he comes in a great convulsive wave.

For a moment only rough panting, fragments of moans. Then Mike is sliding out of him and crumpling next to him, and Tom doesn't have time to ask again if he's all right before Mike hauls him into his arms, exhausted muscles vibrating with spent tension. His lips are moving silently again, brushing the shell of Tom’s ear, and this time he can just make out the shapes of the words.

_Stay. Stay with me._

Tom answers him with a kiss. Right now, it's the only answer he can think of.

~

He doesn't sleep so much as he drifts. He returns to himself when he feels warm calloused hands on him, gentle and almost teasing and rippling faint pleasure through him; he raises his head and Mike is sprawled between his legs, looking up at him and giving him a smile that's downright mischievous.

“Mike.” He’s confused. He thought they were done, at least for the night, but the light has changed and perhaps the night is almost over, and he's hardening, twitching and groaning when Mike curls his hand around his cock and gives him a stroke.

“I can stop if you want.” Mike runs his lips down the shaft and Tom’s eyes roll briefly up in his head. It's the idea of the thing as much as how it feels now. It's the promise of it. It's the fact that Mike so clearly wants to do it, that this is so clearly another one of those things he's wanted for years.

“Don't you dare,” he breathes, and Mike chuckles and closes his wet lips around him and swirls his tongue, and Tom is lost to the world.

Like with fucking him, Mike takes his time, and in fact he's an _asshole_ about it, not speeding up at all when Tom begs him to go faster, give him more; if anything he eases off, doesn't give him anything but a few rapid flicks of his tongue, and Tom groans in frustration and pulls weakly at Mike’s hair, but they both know who’s in charge. And anyway, Mike doesn't torment him forever; there comes at point at which Tom pleads with him, implores him to _let me come oh god you fucking bastard _and Tom finally gets his way. Deep, hard, fast suction and he's wrenching himself up and shouting, crying Mike’s name and spilling into his mouth, and Mike laughs and holds him down by his hips and swallows it all.

Tom gazes into the fuzzy dark. The moon has almost set. Out the window by the bed, the sky is just starting to lighten.

“Was it like you wanted?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Mike says softly, crawling back up and wrapping his arms around Tom again. _Sweetheart_. My God. “It was better.”

~

Maybe an hour of sleep after that. It's light when Tom next opens his eyes, and after a moment of confusion when he realizes he's not on the couch and he's not in bed in what he scornfully thinks of as his _condo,_ there's a flash of alarm when it hits him that he's alone.

The sheets next to him are still warm. Not gone long.

Still here.

He pushes himself up. Instantly the pain rolls in like a dull slow freight train; he grimaces and pushes at the covers, almost afraid to see what his ankle looks like. But it's not as bad as he thought. It's swollen, it hurts, but it's been much worse, and if it's a sprain it's probably not a serious one.

There's another pain, pain that isn’t pain at all. A distant stretching burn, like a memory in his nerves. _Oh_.

_I want you inside me. _

He flops back down and lies there for a few more minutes, processing. Then he sits up and slides back the covers, gets up, half walks and half hops into the hallway. The main room is dim and silent and empty, but the front door is open, and a familiar figure is sitting on the porch steps just outside.

Bare back to him. The scars.

Tom pulls in a breath and hops to the door and out.

With his bumping, thudding progress, there's no way Mike isn't aware of him. No way Mike wasn't aware of him the second he got up and started moving. But Mike doesn't turn, doesn't budge at all, and for a bad instant Tom is certain he's done something else wrong, that all of last night was wrong, and the storm is going to roll back in and possibly worse than before.

But Mike looks at him as he lowers himself gingerly down to sit on the step, and Tom is immediately certain that nothing of the kind is going to happen.

That smile.

The smile turns wryly amused as Mike scans him up and down. “Jesus, dick, put some pants on, you're gonna traumatize the fuckin’ chickens.”

Tom snorts. “You're not wearing pants either.”

“Yeah, well, they're used to me.” Pause, slightly uneasy, and then Mike touches his knee. Just a hand laid over it, a thumb stroking over the knob of bone.

“Y’alright?”

Tom nods. Stretches. He tips his head back; the sky is cloudless and brilliant. It's going to be another beautiful day. “I'm…” He breathes a laugh. “I'm really good.”

“Okay,” Mike says quietly, curls his hand around the nape of Tom’s neck and kisses him. Light, nearly chaste, just a flick of tongue. Like another promise of more later on.

Tom leans against him, rests his head on Mike’s shoulder, and Mike’s arm slides around him as easily as if it's always done that, and they sit there together that way for a while as the day comes into being around them.

“How did it happen?”

Mike starts a bit, as though he had been somewhere else in his head. “Mm?”

“The.” He might imagine this was a bad idea, dangerously close to inviting the storm back in, but that won't happen. He's sure of it. Not now. The storm is over. “Your… back.”

“Oh.” Mike looks down at his hand hanging curled between his knees, as if it might offer him some guidance. His face is unreadable. “Right, yeah.”

“You don't have to tell me. Sorry, it's—”

“No.” Mike sighs heavily. “No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry about before. It's alright. I was being a fuckin’ asshole, that's me every time.” He pauses, his brow slightly furrowed. “It's…”

“I'm guessing it's a long story.”

“It's a story.” Mike ducks his head, swallows, clears his throat. “Happened right after I left. I got jumped by some bad people, they… they _held onto_ _me_ for a while.”

“Hurt you.”

Nod.

“Why?”

“For fun,” Mike says simply, and falls silent.

“I'm sorry,” Tom whispers, and Mike shakes his head. His smile is a little pained, but it's there.

“Don't be. It's over. I got out.” He exhales. “I survived.”

Tom presses his lips to Mike’s shoulder. “You always do.”

“Yeah,” Mike says softly, and stretches out his legs, scuffs his bare heels in the dirt. Above them, a mockingbird bursts into song. “We always do.”

~

It's a good day.

It's not elaborate. It’s not complicated. Nothing really special happens. Breakfast—eggs, of course, only more of an omelet this time with cheese and onions and herbs Tom can't identify but which are absolutely wonderful. And Mike is insisting that Tom stay in bed, _keep that fuckin’ thing elevated, you idiot, c’mon,_ and naturally Tom refuses, and finally Mike helps him out into the yard—grumbling all the way—because even if he can't help with the chores he wants to watch.

Wants to watch this man working, his muscles moving in the sun, lean and strong and healthier than Tom has ever seen him. It takes about an hour and a half of this for Tom to understand that he thinks Mike Pinocchio is beautiful. Scars and all.

They both have those. It's just a question of degrees.

Break for lunch. Break for lunch and a shower, and although it's an extremely tight squeeze and difficult to do any washing at all, Mike wisely points out how hazardous it is for Tom to take a shower alone in his condition, how easy it would be for him to slip and fall, and that's logic Tom finds it difficult to argue with. He finds it even more difficult when he's propped in the corner of the stall, pinned there with Mike’s body, sighing and groaning and thrusting into Mike’s slippery fist, his hot come joining the cool water and flowing away.

They're still wet when Mike lays him down on the bed and fucks him again. This time it's less slow. It's still extremely good.

It's good, lying in this sun-drenched room, coming down with Mike loose and happy in his arms, aching everywhere and loving every damn second of it.

_Love_.

The afternoon is for pulling weeds. Most of the garden is in sight of the porch, so Tom sits there in the rocker, watches, and flips idly through the book Mike read from last night. Most of the poetry is the same, raw and painful and often furious, even violent, and he can see why it resonates with Mike, but not all of it is that way. Some of it is slower, sadder, close to sweet. Scarred and rough and beautiful. 

> _All night I stretched my arms across_  
_him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing_  
_with all my skin and bone _Please keep him safe.  
Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be  
like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed  
to pieces._ Makes a cathedral, him pressing against_  
_me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe_  
_his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me_  
_like stars._

What Mike wanted. For years. All that anger, all that impatience and frustration, and he never once left, he never once went away until the end. Which turns out to not be the end.

Mike has left his shirt off. The muscles flexing in his back, his tanned scarred skin shining in the sun. Tom watches him for a while, working the words he just read over in his mouth and across his tongue. 

> _We have not touched the stars,_   
_nor are we forgiven, which brings us back_   
_to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,_   
_not from the absence of violence, but despite_   
_the abundance of it._

Mike straightens, wipes sweat off his brow. He's very aggressive with the weeds, his motions almost angry, but the tiny smile he sends Tom’s way is anything but.

It's a good day.

It's one of the best.

~

“Read me something.” 

Mike stirs against him. They're sitting on the floor against the couch, gazing into the fire. Tom is in fact half sitting and half lying between Mike’s legs, back against his chest and Mike’s arms around him. It's astonishing how easy it is to touch Mike. It's astonishing how easy it is for Mike to touch him. A day of it and it barely seems new anymore.

Like everything else here, it's comfortable.

“Fuck off,” Mike murmurs, but he blatantly doesn't mean it, and Tom cranes his neck, grazes an awkward kiss against Mike’s jaw at the same time as he digs an elbow into his ribs. He's very nicely buzzed. A single tumbler is on the floor beside them, and beside that is the bottle of excellent scotch, and they've been working through it slowly and steadily since dinner. Not drunk, he doesn't want that, but this kind of warm uncoiling before bed is very pleasant.

Maybe in bed more things will happen. Maybe not. Maybe they'll just sleep. He's honestly fine with both outcomes. As long as he's not there alone.

“I'm serious.” He settles again. “I don't care what it is, it doesn't have to be poetry. Can be anything. I just wanna hear you read.” He smiles at the fire. “You have a nice voice, you know that? When you're not growling at everything.”

“Jesus,” Mike sighs, but then he's pushing Tom gently away and getting to his feet, and there's the sound of his footsteps going to the bookshelf, the rustle of books. A pause, and then him returning, and Tom leans forward again as Mike resituates himself behind him.

Last night Mike’s voice was choked with pain, strangled with years of it. Now, smooth and quiet, he flows, and Tom thinks of_ Aprille with his shoures soote_ and _the droghte of Marche perced to the roote,_ and he decides he might like to see how long it takes Mike to commit the rest of it to recital memory.

He'd like to see how long it takes to do all kinds of things. 

> _won't you celebrate with me_   
_what i have shaped into_   
_a kind of life? i had no model._   
_born in babylon_   
_both nonwhite and woman_   
_what did i see to be except myself?_   
_i made it up_   
_here on this bridge between_   
_starshine and clay,_   
_my one hand holding tight_   
_my other hand; come celebrate_   
_with me that everyday_   
_something has tried to kill me_   
_and has failed._

Mike falls silent. The book drops lightly to the floor. The flames dance in the stove, and Tom sits in Mike’s silence and listens to the last lines echoing through his mind, the quiet strength of them. The peace.

_come celebrate_   
_with me that everyday_   
_something has tried to kill me_   
_and has failed._

“I’m gonna stay,” Tom says softly, and he smiles again at Mike’s equally soft intake of breath. “I'm gonna stay here. With you.”

Mike is quiet a moment. His breath is warm against the crown of Tom’s head, his fingers running lazily up and down Tom’s forearm. They stopped for a second but they've resumed. “You sure?”

“I'm sure.” He turns his head, nuzzles. Mike’s chest. The solidity. The steady thrum of the heart beneath his breastbone. “Unless you wanna kick me out.”

“They'll be expecting you back,” Mike murmurs. “What about the election? What about all those deals you gotta make?”

“Someone else can make ‘em.” And he’s okay with that. Once he wouldn't have been, but now… Now it needs to be out of his hands. His hands need to do something else. “They don’t need me. They think they do, but they'll find out they don't.” He releases a long breath. “I don't want to be special anymore.”

“Mm.” Mike rests his chin against the top of Tom’s head. Tom can feel him thinking.

“I'm not gonna kick you out,” he says finally. Then, easy as the poetry: “I love you.”

Tom laughs. He's run out of ways to be shocked, and that's a nice place to be. “Of course you do.”

Mike snorts. “Asshole.”

“Yeah, you're one too.” Tom reaches down, takes Mike’s hand, weaves their fingers together. “So you deserve me.”

“No.” Mike shakes his head, buries his face in Tom’s hair. Tom can feel his grin. “I really don't.”

~

Bed. Maybe things happen. Maybe things don’t happen, not right away, but later when the moon is high the two of them move through the shadows, moving together, running joyfully against each other like a pair of horses. Or maybe there's no running. Maybe it's much slower than that, much gentler, sweet, and it goes on for a very long time.

Or maybe there's only sleep, deep and dreamless, and not alone. Never alone again. No more leaving, until the last time. No more goodbyes, until the last one.

This isn't Paradise. But it's more than enough for two men who don't want or need much, except each other.

_-end-_

**Author's Note:**

> Poetry: 
> 
> "Wishbone" - Richard Siken  
"Saying Your Names" - Richard Siken  
"Snow and Dirty Rain" - Richard Siken  
"won't you celebrate with me" - Lucille Clifton
> 
> and the line "Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us" is by Sappho.


End file.
